


As Every Color Illuminates

by SirenAlpha



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 13:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3694904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SirenAlpha/pseuds/SirenAlpha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Upon seeing each other, soulmates receive the ability to see color. Oliver saw a woman in his father's old office the night he returned to Starling. Felicity only saw a photograph of two dead men. Years later, they meet properly. Felicity has no idea who her soulmate is, and Oliver just isn't sure it's her. Soulmate AU from 3x14</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Every Color Illuminates

**Author's Note:**

> This fic covers from 3x14 looped around to 1x14 and a quite a bit of it is lifted straight from the episodes, dialogue and all. However, there's also been a lot shifted from how it happens in canon so make sure you pay attention and don't skip over scenes. Also, because I wrote it by listening an occasional name might be spelled wrong. This story also goes back and forth between Oliver and Felicity's pov.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Felicity held in a sigh as the elevator doors opened. She didn’t deserve to be sent up to the executive suite after normal hours just because her supervisor was incompetent and had left the status report to the last minute. She went down the hall and to the right, just as she had the last time she had done this. One day, her supervisor would get his shit together, and she would come up here in the daylight.

She slowed as she approached the desk. Standing behind the seat of power always gave her a little thrill.  She set down the folder and noticed that the photos had been rearranged. She studied the new photo even if she had probably seen it before. The media had ran it when the _Queen’s Gambit_ had gone down, but Robert and Oliver Queen smiled from the photo like nothing could ever go wrong for them.

“You’re cute,” she told the photo, looking right at Oliver. Granted, the angle didn’t really do him any favors, but she had seen other photos of him. Seeing this one again didn’t change her opinion. She leaned onto the desk. “It’s too bad you’re, you know, dead. Which is obviously a lot worse for you than it is for me.”

She stood up, not adding that she likely would never have had a chance with him living either. “I really need to learn to stop talking to myself.”

She headed back towards the elevators then paused. She tilted her head, watching the floor. The harder she looked, the more the grey ebbed away, replaced by something else. She squinted at it then held her hand up in front of her face. It looked the same grey tone it always did until it didn’t. Then it faded back to the grey. 

“You can’t imagine what you haven’t seen,” she said, trying to calm herself. “So how is this happening?”

She looked around, but didn’t see anyone. The only people she’d even looked at recently were two dead men in a photo. She turned back to the desk, looking at the back of the picture frame. She walked back over to it and plucked it off the desk. She squinted at it like it could give her an explanation. She only succeeded in having Oliver Queen appear in what soulmates must call color, his skin turning something close to what her hands had turned.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered to herself. “You’re dead.”

She set the photo down, looking around. “Hello?” she called out.

She walked from the desk, back towards the elevators. Felicity searched the entire floor, but didn’t see a single person. Her lips kept tugging down into a frown the way they usually did when she was about to cry from frustration. She glared at the back of the picture as she hastily wiped away a couple of tears with her fingertips. Whoever she had to have seen either hadn’t wanted to see her even after seeing color, or somehow seeing a picture of a dead man had been enough to trick her body into seeing color. Either option was enough to cause her to sniffle and have to brush her hands over her cheeks to get rid of the tears.

She took the elevators straight down to the garage. 

* * *

 

“I really need to learn to stop talking to myself,” the woman who had come in told herself as she went around the desk.

On the other end of the conference room, hidden by the wall, Oliver Queen smiled. He moved out from behind the wall then froze as something happened to the woman’s hair. The woman stopped as well, and he ducked back behind the wall again. He kept his breathing even and checked the area again.

Nothing had moved, but the longer he looked the more different it appeared. First his hands, then his clothes, and then the floor and the furniture too changed as the woman’s hair had, but not quite in the same way. He had to focus on it to see it, but it came through. He could see what had to be the colors all those fanciful stories of soulmates talked about.

He looked around the corner again at the woman as it had to be her, the person who had caused him to see color just by looking at her.

“You can’t imagine what you haven’t seen,” she said, looking at her own hands. “So how is this happening?”

She began to look around, and he ducked behind the wall again. He listened to her footsteps and her voice as she murmured something else. As he listened, the grey began to fade more easily as he looked at the items around him. He caught one last glimpse of her as she left the office, and her hair had color without him even trying.

Once she was out of the office, Oliver shook his head and quickly returned to the office to scramble back into the vent he’d made his entrance from. He secured the grate again then paused. He could still hear the woman’s shoes as she walked around. He sighed as Maseo hissed at him to get out again, and he left.

He made it down on to the street, but had more trouble getting to the car Maseo was in than he had getting in or out of the building. The colors of the cars moving past kept flashing. The colored light blinded, too new and unquantifiable. He wrenched open the passenger door and sunk into the seat, covering his eyes with his hands for a little reprieve.

“What’s wrong?” Maseo asked. “You got the information, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but,” Oliver said, removing his hands and staring as the color of Maseo’s skin didn’t come in evenly. “You and Tatsu, you see colors don’t you?”

Maseo’s frown deepened, and he leaned away. “Yes, but what does that have to do with the mission?”

“It doesn’t. I’m just starting to see color,” he confessed, blinking again as Maseo’s skin settled on a color but the buildings across the street that he could see behind his head kept shifting.

Maseo sighed long enough to make it seem like he might not breathe in again. “You’re seeing color? You saw your soulmate?”

“I think so,” he said, covering his eyes again. “It’s not staying very even, and it’s not pleasant.”

“Great,” Maseo said, leaning back in his seat. “Let’s just get the information to Waller then we can deal with you seeing color.”

Oliver nodded, not removing his hands. 

* * *

 

Felicity nearly crashed driving home. She still had a tear or two, but mostly the newly discovered color of brake lights and stop lights distracted her. “At least it’s not the cars,” she told herself, gripping her steering wheel tighter.

The world stayed mostly black and white, but light came through in color very well. She had no words to describe what she saw. They flashed and wavered, but they never left entirely. It wasn’t a fluke or a mistake. Somehow, she had been in a room with her soulmate and not seen or talked to them at all.

Felicity had read a romance novel or two in her lifetime. They always described seeing color as this brilliant explosion centered around their soulmate that made everything bright. It had never been some pathetic flash in the floor and blinding lights telling her to stop. It didn’t leave the world duller in comparison to the flashes, and without someone to learn the color’s names with.

When she got home, she threw her keys into the basket she kept for them and went straight to her laptop. She searched up sites for new found soulmates to learn the colors and their names. She had to turn up the brightness on her screen and stare hard enough to cause a headache to see them, but she did it. She renamed the floor in the executive office green, her dyed hair blond, and Oliver Queen’s eyes blue.

She closed her laptop and moved to the full length mirror in her bedroom. She stared for a long time, memorizing all the colors she could on herself. The romance novels she had read always had a scene where the newly color seeing soulmate studied themselves in the mirror. They had never described the colors, but had done everything they could to tell the reader how beautiful they had become with the addition of color.

Felicity watched as her shoulders shook as she cried because she kept slipping back to grey. 

* * *

 

Oliver watched Maseo explain the information they had gathered to Waller. He kept his arms stiffly crossed over his chest as if that would help keep her from not noticing he could see flashes of color now.

“The auction is tonight,” Maseo announced. “In four hours.”

“Where?” Waller asked.

“They’re still working on that. The crawler received 2.7 gigabytes of data. It’s taking some time to comb through.”

Oliver left as they spoke. He had people to check up on while he was still in Starling and if he never got another chance. He made his way to the Merlyn’s place for the party he’d overheard Tommy and Thea talking about. At least Tommy would be there and possibly more people he knew. The cars moving past him made it difficult, and he had a headache by the time he arrived.

The lights and the noise coming out of the house aggravated his headache, but he’d already come so far. Entering the house added the smell of alcohol and too many people’s body odor. He couldn’t recall feeling disgusted with the parties he’d attended before the island, but he’d never had color burning into his eye sockets before the island.

He scanned the crowd, wincing at all the mismatching and uncoordinated colors everyone wore. He spotted Tommy and walked slowly around him at a distance, trying to listen into his conversation over the music. Laurel appeared out of the crowd, and he watched the two of them.

Laurel had complained to him in the past about mismatched colors before, but he hadn’t ever believed her. She had told him again and again they were meant to be because she saw color when they met. He had brushed off every time she had tried to get closer to him because he never saw what she saw.

Tommy had complained to him once about light blue on red on some girl’s shirt, and Oliver had stared at him blankly, drunk and with no clue what he was talking about.

He continued to watch and try and listen, especially for any references of color. He didn’t hear anything, but he saw Tommy look away from Laurel and followed his gaze. He squeezed his eyes shut at the sight of his sister and the ugly lighter colors on her outfit. Tommy confronted her, and Laurel caught up with him.

Thea moved away from them, and Oliver saw her walk right up to her dealer. He gritted his teeth and shook his head as she accepted drugs, and the dealer moved upstairs. He followed him up.

Oliver pushed the dealer into the wall. “You stay away from Thea Queen.”

He had to squint with the colored lights changing the dealer’s skin tone to unnatural hues.

“Who the hell do you think…?” the dealer began then leaned towards him. “Holy crap, you’re Oliver Queen.”

He blinked at the dealer and took a step back.

“You’re supposed to be dead. People are gonna lose their mind-”

Oliver cut him off with a shove back into the wall. He deepened his voice. “Stay away from my sister.”

“How’d you like to be dead again?” the dealer asked before lunging forward with a switchblade.

Oliver caught his attack and spun him so he had him bending backwards with arm around the dealer’s neck. He hesitated a moment then broke his neck and tossed him over the railing. The blood didn’t come out black. 

* * *

 

All Felicity had to go on was one crappy picture of Oliver Queen, or else someone who had access to the executive suite of Queen Consolidated that she hadn’t seen before. She started looking through the personnel at QC. Not one person she checked on that list that she hadn’t seen before and not seen color or hadn’t seen at all. She crossed them all off one by one with a heavy sigh.

“Now, like a creepy stalker,” she said as she began her thorough search on Oliver Queen. The internet had plenty of information on Oliver Queen, but she looked for the things that weren’t so well known and a little more intimate. Anything that would indicate to her that they could possibly be soulmates.

She tried to sift past all the playboy partying information on him that inundated the internet along with his disappearance. His school records prior to college showed he either wasn’t that bright or hadn’t applied himself in at least math. She noted that he had stuck with hockey up into a year or so before his death and after he’d dropped out of college again. He also hadn’t ever betrayed his best friend, Tommy Merlyn, despite cheating on his girlfriend, Laurel Lance, numerous times including with her sister. He also seemed to have a close relationship with his much younger sister and fairly good ones with both of his parents.

Focusing on the pictures of him, she noted that sometimes the color of his clothing matched and sometimes it didn’t. He matched more often when his girlfriend was pictured with him. She also noticed that both his best friend and girlfriend never wore clashing colors, but Tommy never had a long term girlfriend.

She kept digging for hours, trying to find some clue that he either might be her soulmate or that he still lived. She checked the clock and forced herself to turn her laptop off and go to bed. She had her pajamas on and the lights off when she realized that after closing the laptop it hadn’t taken any effort to see the color of her pajamas. She turned her bedside lamp on just to check that she could see their pink color immediately.

“How?” she asked, staring at her pink sleeve. “How can it be him?” 

* * *

 

Oliver watched silently with his arms crossed as the police went around questioning everyone from the party as the body was removed. He saw Detective Lance head towards his sister and had to take a few steps to the side to keep them in sight. He couldn’t hear them at that distance with the other chatter around him, but he saw Tommy and later Laurel come up to stand beside Thea. The detective began to raise his voice, but he heard a gun’s safety click and Maseo whisper to him, “We’re leaving. Right now.”

He shot his sister once last glance before following Maseo away from the scene. He didn’t begin reprimanding him until they got close to the car.

“What were you thinking?” Maseo snapped. “Anyone at that party could have seen you.”

“Yeah, well, I pulled the hoodie down to cover my face,” Oliver said, making a hand motion around the edge of his hood.

“That disguise wouldn’t have worked even if you smeared grease paint over your face.”

“So what? You came to chastise me at gun point?” he asked, tucking his hands into his pockets.

“We got the auction location from the scraper program. Keng is using a defunct steel factory owned by your own family’s company.”

Oliver looked away, noticing the colors coming out even in the darkness. “I don’t care. I’m done with the mission.”

“Oliver,” he said, all anger gone from his voice.

“No, coming back here, Maseo,” he snapped, pulling a hand out of his pocket to gesture. “Has shown me all the wreckage that I have left behind, and if I go with you tonight and I get killed, then I lose any chance I’ve ever had of fixing all the things that I broke.”

“You don’t have that chance,” he retorted, taking a step towards him. “Waller will kill-”

“Yeah,” Oliver interrupted, his voice close to breaking. “My family’s resourceful, we have connections in the media, there has to be a way to shelter us from whatever Waller does.”

He didn’t yell back at him immediately, taking a breath and looking down before speaking. “Oliver, if you want redemption, start with all the lives Chien Na Wei’s bioweapon ends.”

“Those people are strangers to me,” he said, matching Maseo’s calmer tone. “These people, they’re my friends and my family.”

“And they would be ashamed of the selfish choice you’re making.”

“They’re already ashamed of me,” he admitted, almost smiling about it.

Maseo just looked tired. “This has nothing to do with you seeing color.”

“No, I don’t know that person either, and all the colors are doing is giving me a headache.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

Oliver held out his hand. “Goodbye, Maseo.”

He turned from him and opened the car door instead of shaking hands. Oliver walked away. 

* * *

 

Felicity spent less than a half hour in her bed with the lights off, laying down but not sleeping, before getting up again and searching out her romance novels and getting her laptop out again. She checked the first few chapters of the novels to double check the meeting between soulmates and when color came into it. Not one had only one soulmate see the other, and obviously none of them had one of their soulmates dead in the North China Sea.

She then began searching to news stories about unusual soulmate meetings, and it brought up practically every soulmate meeting ever reported. Seeing color did not work as well over distance when it comes to matching people romatically. It also didn’t help narrow down people if soulmates met each other in a group or in crowded areas.

Even so, searching the internet for weird stories didn’t bring to light one where someone saw a picture of their soulmate and saw color, especially after seeing their picture plenty of times before. She did find a couple of stories of how the color went away again entirely after one of the soulmates died.

She searched for any conspiracy theories about the _Queen’s Gambit_. Any she found had several years on them as conspirators seemed to have stopped theorizing after the first year with no sign of either the yacht or the Queens. The most popular one she found mentioned a chain of uninhabited islands that either Queen could have potentially washed up on given their proximity to where the yacht supposedly went down. The largest island, Lian Yu, never got searched due to China blocking the US attempts as the island had been used as a prisoner’s camp and prior to that, a base for Japanese soldiers in World War II and had been covered in land mines.

“This is insane,” she told herself, scrubbing her face with her hands. “Oliver Queen is not alive, and he is not your soulmate.”

She googled the distance between Lian Yu and Starling City anyways, and received an answer that had too many miles by sea to swim. She searched for stories with soulmates and ghosts. She read the first story that popped up then closed her laptop.

“Nope, not it, not Queen, somebody must have snuck in and that’s what happened.”

* * *

 

Oliver sneaked back into his home past the security he used to trust and watched as the grey of his home faded into soft colors he didn’t know the names of. He would have time for that later. He sat down in a chair in the living room they used most frequently and sighed in relief. He’d made it home.

He noticed the tablet left on the table in front of him and pulled the USB he had stolen earlier out of his pocket. He plugged it in and watched his father’s message. He smiled at the sight of him alive and moving, replacing the old images of his dead body. His father confessed to wrong doings, the ones he had told Oliver to fix just before shooting himself, and Oliver’s smile disappeared. He mentioned the book Oliver had pulled from his pocket and warned him not to place protecting family above his own soul. His messaged finished with him telling Oliver to be better than he was and to save Starling before ending with his last ‘I love you’.

Oliver pulled out the USB, got up from the chair, and left the home with the comforting colors.

It seemed to take forever to get to the Glades without a ride, but he couldn’t drive with the ever shifting colors even if he did have a car. He still had several yards to go when he heard gunfire from outside the factory. He searched for a quick way in that wouldn’t get himself and Maseo or any other ARGUS agents killed. He made it inside through the roof, spotting Maseo being walked up at gun point to Chien Na Wei.

“I don’t like uninvited guests,” she said, followed by something in Chinese.

Oliver got the shot off on the man leveling his gun at Maseo. He jumped down from the rafters as other armed guards shot at him. Chien Na Wei and the other participants at the auction began to run away as he shot at the guards. He joined Maseo behind a stack of crates.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he told him.

“Actually,” Maseo said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You arrived right on time.”

“Let’s go.”

Maseo moved first. Oliver went out again through the upper levels and spotted a moving car from the lower rooftops. He shot as he jumped to land on it, and he made the jump, but fell off the back due to the rain. He landed on his feet on the ground. He shot at the back of the car, taking a few steps to follow, until the car swerved and hit some stacked barrels.

He approached the car as Chien Na Wei climbed out. He pistol whipped her as Maseo pulled out Keng from the other side of the vehicle.

“You have a choice to make,” Oliver told Keng, deepening his voice the way he had with the dealer.

“What choice?”

“Whether or not you want to keep your hand.”

Keng kept his hand, and he and Maseo finished their mission in Starling. 

* * *

 

Felicity woke exhausted and groggy. She made herself a cup of coffee despite it being midmorning on a Saturday. She forced herself to act normal, get her chores done, watch some TV. Her TV shows, however, brought her back to soulmates again. She noticed how color coordinated the actors outfits were and the staging of scenes, and she searched up on her phone how it was possible that mass media had color when most people were color blind without their soulmates. Turned out, many soulmates moved into creative fields like television after finding their soulmates as they wanted to share and explore the use of the new found colors.

She had to stop watching after a few minutes as the moving colors, both between the characters on screen moving and her ability to see the colors still showing itself to be inconsistent, distracted her from the plot and hurt her eyes.

She tried coding for a pet side project to keep her occupied and away from the TV, but she got sidetracked as she realized that the different greys in her coding were actually different colors.

“Is nothing sacred?” she asked her computer before just laying her head down on her desk. “I hope this gets better because it’s really annoying right now.”

She picked her head up again and searched for more science based sites about how seeing color worked after finding a soulmate. She found technical depictions of how eyes see color, information to help calm yourself down if the colors caused problems, and then a theory or two about how the ability to see color got turned on and if the same process happened in animals. The scientific community seemed certain that facial features worked as a type of code to turn on color, people who had trouble recognizing faces had yet to see color, but 2D picture images were not enough to trick the brain into turning on color.

“Nothing on what happens to people as they see their soulmates,” she grumbled, clinking through and reading a few more articles on the subject.

She switched to finding information on unstable colors as hers still faded. As far as she could tell, other soulmates only saw that when their soulmate was dying. She had to take deep breaths to keep calm after reading that.

Only one short article posited a theory that soulmates saw mostly black and white when they didn’t know each other well or didn’t stay close to each other after meeting.

She nodded as she read it. “The asshole isn’t dying on me, they just want both of us to see trippy colors and give us headaches instead of meeting me.” 

* * *

 

Oliver watched the morning light through the curtains, waiting for Waller to speak with him, and the colors didn’t change no matter how hard he concentrated. They must actually be off-white.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned around to see Waller. “Thanks for the trip home. Have a nice flight back to Hong Kong.”

She had her arms crossed, and she gave him a flat look. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Mr. Queen.”

“Oh, the hell it’s not,” he said, beginning his list on his fingers. “You have the Omega, You have Chien Na Wei. It’s over.”

“I’m sorry to say,” Waller retorted, walking towards him. “It’s not up to either one of us.”

A man came in wearing military fatigues. She turned towards him then stepped aside as he moved towards them. “This him?” he asked her.

She nodded and stepped aside.

“General Matthew Shreive,” he said to Oliver. “You done your country quite a service today, Mr. Queen. That said, I’ve got some news you’re not gonna want to hear.”

Oliver gave him a flat look. “Well, General, I’m used to that by now.

“We’re going to need to debrief you, back in China.”

Oliver shook his head, turning away.

“Once that’s accomplished,” the General said, stepping towards him. “And the Omega secured, I’ll make sure you’ll go any place in the world you wanna go.”

Oliver gave him a hard look.

“Sound fair?”

Oliver glanced at Waller who’s expression had hardly changed through the entire exchanged. He glanced down and nodded. “Yeah.” 

* * *

 

Over time, Felicity learned to tell who had a soulmate. She sometimes saw a person on the street with an outfit that had colors that matched too well. Women she found to be a little easier to tell as they generally wore more jewelry and accessories that they could pair with their outfits. She didn’t find many, none of her friends or her mother showed any signs. Still, she had a theory or two about a couple of her coworkers in the IT department having soulmates.

She started to match her colors as well, but on bad days her clothes didn’t match at all. She would come home and study herself in the mirror and realize that her pants were actually navy, not black, and therefore didn’t work quite right with her shirt.

After a year of color, a newer coworker in the IT department, Alissa, confronted her, all excited to hear happy news. “Who is it? Go on any dates yet?”

“What?” Felicity asked, staring in shock at the woman invading her work space.

“You’re wearing coordinating colors. You had to have seen your soulmate. I haven’t met anyone else who has seen their soulmate before. Who’s yours?”

“I have no idea,” Felicity confessed, taking deep breaths.

“What do you mean?” Alissa asked, smile dropping.

“I didn’t see anyone when I started seeing color,” she explained, shaking her head. “I went up to the CEO’s office to drop off a report and then color.”

“You saw no one?” she asked, eyes and mouth open wide.

“Only a picture of Robert and Oliver Queen, last people I saw before color.”

“But that’s impossible, pictures don’t do anything. Everybody knows that.”

“I know, I know, but I don’t have anything else to go on,” Felicity said, smoothing out her clothes as if that could fix her emotions.

“I want to help. Someone had to have seen you, and you see them. You deserve to find each other,” she said, her smile back in full force and her hands clasped together.

“You don’t have to,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’ve already been looking for a year.”

“No, I want to help. It’s a little exciting, don’t you think? Like a romantic mystery,” she said, nodding seriously.

“Alright, if you really want to. I’ll even invite you to the wedding if you find them first.”

“I won’t let you down.”

Felicity sighed in relief as she returned to her work and Alissa went back to hers.

Alissa didn’t find out more than she did despite coming up with a few creative ideas. She couldn’t help Felicity when grey tried to blanket her colors. She stared too intently at people at work occasionally, as if looking at one of them long enough could cause her colors to come in right. It never worked, but she couldn’t get herself to stop. Alissa noticed every time and always shot her a sad puppy dog like look. 

* * *

 

Oliver had headaches more often after starting to see color, and colored lights set off the worst headaches after prolonged exposure. He picked up the names of colors from Maseo and Tatsu, learning them in Chinese and not English as the couple had never had a reason to translate colors.

Getting back to the island had felt like a reprieve after flashing ads, cars, and people who moved too quickly when fighting or running away. The greens and browns washed in and out of the landscape like the waves on the beach. He could see and tell the own color of his hair by the time he had lit up a bonfire on the beach to alert a fisherman’s boat to his presence. Maseo hadn’t been able to teach him the name of the color of his hair.

He sheared off the long hair he called yellow, even if it was the wrong name, just before the flight that would take him home to Starling. They brought him to a hospital instead of his home, and he saw doctors rather than his friends and family. He watched all the personnel as they moved around him and studied him. He kept his answers to their prying questions short. When they finally left, he stared at the walls and found them to be a muted yellow that looked nothing like the color of his hair or the sand of the island’s beaches.

He climbed out of the bed, ignoring at least one personnel’s orders, and stood at the window. The lights of the city came through in clear color, easy on his eyes rather than burning his sockets. He hadn’t looked for the colors on the buildings when he’d left two years earlier. His mother came into his hospital room, and he saw her hair was the same not yellow as his, but brighter.

“Oliver?” she asked.

He tried to smile at her. “Mom.”

“Oh, my beautiful boy,” she said, tears in her eyes, as she wrapped him in her arms and pressed a kiss against his neck. 

* * *

 

Felicity got the news from her personal email when she checked it on her tablet in the morning. Oliver Queen lived, returned from the island the theories she had read about years ago had postulated. She gaped at it long enough for his old picture, the one that matched the one on the desk that night, came into full color.

She almost didn’t make it to work on time and went straight to Alissa’s cubicle anyways. “Is it true?”

Alissa stared at her for a moment with wide eyes. “About Oliver Queen? Yeah, everyone’s already talking all about it. He made it five years on that island which is absolutely incredible. Do you think it might actually be him, now?”

Felicity stared at Alissa for a moment, tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth for once. “I have no idea. How can it be if he’s been on that island the whole time? They all say photos aren’t enough and what photo would he even have of me? He has no idea who I am.”

Alissa shrugged, running a hand through her hair. “I have no explanation for you. Maybe find a way to bump into him and see if your colors get any better?”

“How on earth am I supposed to just bump into Oliver Queen?”

She twisted her lips. “Is he going to work here at all?”

“I have no idea. He’d be on upper floors anyways.”

“Well, you go up there sometimes. You need to at least see for yourself. You’d have quite a catch if it were really Oliver Queen,” she said, grinning.

Felicity shook her head, laughing. “That would be too ridiculous even for romance novels, but I wouldn’t mind an opportunity to bump into him.” 

* * *

 

“Your room is exactly as you left it,” his mother assured him. “Never had a heart to change a thing.”

She didn’t notice as he looked around, practically squinting to make the brown of the wooden paneling appear.

“Oliver.”

It took him a moment to recognize the voice and the man. He set down the box of all his possessions that mattered, and faced the man who had somehow been placed before Thea or Tommy or even Raisa in greeting him upon his return home.

“It’s Walter,” he said and held out his hand when Oliver didn’t respond. “Walter Steele.”

Oliver shook his hand and looked over to his mother.

“You remember Walter, your father’s friend from the company,” she said, placing a hand on his arm and his back.

He moved away from both of them towards Raisa as he spotted her coming in. He gave her what he could of a smile. “It’s good to see you, Raisa.”

She grinned at him and took hold of his hands. “Welcome home, Mr. Oliver.”

She looked past him to his mother. “Mr. Merlyn phoned. He wants to join you for dinner.”

“Wonderful,” Moira said, and Oliver heard a door upstairs open then close.

He looked up as his mother said his name. “Did you hear that?” she asked as he walked past her again.

He spied his sister on the landing on the stairs. “Hey, sis,” he told her, smiling for her.

She rushed down the stairs, saying, “I knew it, I knew you were alive.”

She still had to stand on tip toes to wrap her arms over his shoulders, and she hugged him as tightly as she could, pressing her head against his. He wrapped his arms around her.

“I missed you so much.”

“You were with me the whole time.”

Two years had never felt so long, trying to get back after that one little taste of Starling.

“How have you been?” he asked as she pulled away to look at him. “How has everyone else been?”

“Not great,” she said with a few uneven nods, not mentioning any substance abuse. “But it’s going to get better. Tommy tried to act like nothing changed for a while, but now he’s just frivolous rather than a partier. Laurel is a lawyer, trying to help people. She doesn’t like you so much anymore.”

He nodded. After all, her sister, Sara, hadn’t made it back with him. “A lot has changed.”

“Yeah, but it will be better now.”

He saw the brown in her hair and the green in her eyes. He didn’t tell her about the colors. 

* * *

 

Felicity did manage to get work done before ending her work day and heading for the exit. Alissa stopped her on her way out to give her a hug.

“If it’s him,” she told her, looking her right in the eyes. “It’ll work out. Somehow, it will happen for you.”

Felicity shook her head. “It’s probably not even him. It was just a picture. He’s the heir to the company, and I’m just an IT girl.”

“Details really when it comes to soulmates,” she said with a shrug. “I know coming from rivals schools isn’t quite as big a deal, but I think every soulmate has some hurdles to step over.”

“He’s been on an island for five years, too. What would we even have to talk about if he’s not current with technology?”

“I think you’re forgetting the most important thing is that he’s not dead, and you have something to go on. Have a little faith and hope,” Alissa admonished, then leaned in close and whispered. “If you’re really that worried, find a way to talk to him anonymously. Surely you can find a way to make that happen.”

“I-” Felicity began then shook her head. “I’ll give it like a month, and if nothing happens I’ll work something out.”

“Good, it’s a start. You can at least confirm if he sees in color then,” she said, smiling.

Felicity nodded, “Yeah, maybe, I’ll see you later.”

She took a deep breath then continued on her way home. She could set Oliver Queen aside just like she had two years ago. Him being alive didn’t necessarily change anything. It certainly hadn’t made the colors she saw anymore even.  

* * *

 

Tommy arrived later for dinner and to catch him up on pop culture, and Oliver staved off any questions about the island and didn’t share his suspicions on Tommy and Laurel. He picked at Walter’s relationship with Moira instead and left as soon as he could.

Oliver couldn’t fall asleep on the bed even after opening the windows and so found himself a spot on the floor. Of course, now that he’d returned to his life, he had dreams of how he had left it.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He woke with a gasp, knocked his assailant to the floor and kept them still with a hand to their throat.

“Oliver,” someone snapped.

He looked up to see Walter Steele. He looked down, his hand on his mother’s neck and their skin tones matching. He gasped for air as he scrambled away from his mother while she coughed. Walter helped her up. Oliver’s hand hit a chair, and he used it to get onto his feet to move if need be.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head with his heart pounding in his chest and anxiety in his lungs. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, Oliver,” she said, her voice soft despite the wind blowing her hair around and Walter’s arms around her. She kneeled down to be at his level. “It’s alright, sweetheart. You’re home.”

He could only stare at her as he tried to settle his breathing.

“You’re home,” she repeated. 

* * *

 

Felicity made herself a simple, but filling dinner. She cleaned up after it, got herself a bowl of ice cream, and sat down to watch TV. When she finished her ice cream, she switched to checking her social media. All of them had a blue theme, and she still hadn’t decided whether that was intentional on their part or not.

She kept up with her mother by liking all her pictures on facebook, the only site she’d learned to work. Her friends from college mostly kept to twitter, mostly using a hashtag about programming problems. Her old roommate, Karen, with a rather serious photography hobby had graduated to using a blog to show off her photos in the past year. Karen couldn’t see color, but she captured light well. It brushed across the pictures, lighting up mundane objects or sceneries and bestowing them with a sense of significance. Felicity looked forward to the day her friend found her soulmate and could learn to use color the way she used light.

She crawled into bed later that night, after the lights were turned off, and pulled out her phone. Some site had posted a new picture of Oliver Queen. The shot didn’t turn out any more flattering than the photo she’d seen on the desk all those years ago, but he looked so much better with short, cropped hair and stubble. She tapped the photo so it filled up the screen of her phone.

“Please, if you can see color,” she whispered to the photo, running her thumb along his jaw line even if it dragged the photo. “Don’t let it be me.”

She sniffed, feeling a tear run sideways off her face. “You’ve been on an island for five years. You’re going to need help. You need someone who is good with people, not computers. Please.”

Oliver, in the photo, hadn’t even looked at the camera. Felicity stared at him, long enough for the background to come into color, then shut off her phone and set it aside. She curled up in her bed and fell asleep. 

* * *

 

Oliver and Tommy get kidnapped on their first trip into the city.

“Mr. Queen,” a man behind a red mask yelled at Oliver as he took the bag covering his head off. “Did your father survive that accident?”

Oliver didn’t answer as he tested the zip ties restraining him and observed their surroundings and the other men in masks. The man in the mask tased him in response. Oliver gritted his teeth and breathed through the pain.

“Did he make it to island? Did he tell you anything?”

He tased Oliver again.

“Yes, he did,” Oliver spat, looking down.

“What did he tell you Mr. Queen?”

He checked that Tommy was still unconscious then looked up. “He told me that I’m going to kill you.”

The man laughed. “You’re delusional. You’re zip cuffed to that chair.”

Oliver revealed his unrestrained hands. “Not anymore.”

The first man moved, and Oliver used the chair to his advantage. He took down the first three in rapid succession. The last man ran past Tommy, and Oliver took the time to pause and check his friend’s pulse. Then he ran after the other man.

He passed through a door as the masked man spun and shot at him. He spotted stairs and made his way up and away from the line of fire. He found the man again on the other side of the building, trying to take the stairs down to the ground. He shot at him again, but Oliver didn’t take long using parkour to catch up to him.

He got his arm around the man’s neck, just as he had the drug dealer.

“You don’t have to do this,” the man pleaded.

“You killed that man in the alley, and no one can know my secret.”

He snapped the man’s neck and dropped his body. 

* * *

 

Felicity heard about Oliver Queen’s kidnap right after making it to work. She got herself an extra cup of coffee and sat right down at her desk to work. She heard a knock on her door about an hour after she had started working.

“Yes?” she asked, looking up to see Alissa in the doorway.

“You head about it, didn’t you?” she asked, coming into the room to take a seat in her spare chair. “About Oliver Queen’s kidnapping?”

“Yeah,” she answered, biting her lip and turning away from her computer.

“And?” she asked, giving her a look. “You’re not worried at all?”

“He’s okay and he can probably just hire a body guard. He’s also not my soulmate. I don’t have to worry about it.”

“There’s a possibility, still.”

“But there shouldn’t be,” Felicity said, shaking her head. “He’s not my soulmate, and I’m not his. We’ve never seen each other. We will never cross paths. We’re not suited for each other and I’m not attracted to him.”

Alissa laughed for far too long as Felicity’s cheeks burned. “Do you not have eyes? I have my soulmate and will still admit he’s attractive,” Alissa said, placing a hand on her chest as she calmed down. “Oh, that was hilarious.”

“He’s a playboy, or at least was, and now he’s just come back from being on a deserted island. He probably doesn’t even know how modern technology works let alone any of the things I’m interested in,” she countered, giving her a flat look.

“Then you’ll have a chance to be the one to catch him up,” she said, giving Felicity an earnest look before sighing. “Just don’t give up all hope on finding a soulmate you know exists. This is the closest you’ve ever been to getting an answer.”

“And that’s what so horrible about it,” Felicity said, fiddling with the pens on her desk. “What if it’s not him? I just embarrass myself in front of hot rich guy, and then I’ll really be left with no clue.”

Alissa frowned, looking more heartbroken about it than Felicity felt. “I guess it’s a risk you’ll just have to take.” 

* * *

 

Oliver blinked repeatedly as he walked into the party, and the blue lights swung in his direction. He kept his eyes down, and Tommy caught him walking in anyways. “Man of the hour!” Tommy shouted. “Ladies, welcome him home!”

People crowded around him once they reached the bottom of the stairs, and “We are the Champions” started playing. Oliver got up on a table like he would have many years ago, and Tommy passed him a drink. He gulped it down. “I missed tequila!” he shouted, and the crowd yelled and went back to partying.

As soon as he got back to ground level, Tommy tried to point out someone for him to hook up with. Oliver swallowed down either anxiety leftover from what had happened after the last woman he’d slept with or the words to describe blue to Tommy even though he didn’t speak Chinese.

He glanced away and spotted Thea, her dress almost matching the lighting, talking with another drug dealer. “Back in a minute,” he told Tommy, moving towards her when he saw her tuck drugs into her purse.

“Ollie, hey,” she said, her voice uneven, as he pulled her away from her friends. “This party is sick.”

“Who let you in here?”

“I believe it was somebody who said ‘right this way, Miss Queen’,” she said, recovered from her surprise.

“Well, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Ollie, I’m not twelve anymore.”

“No, you’re seventeen.”

She shook her head. “Ollie, I love you, but you can’t come back here and judge me, especially for being just like you.”

“I know it couldn’t have been easy for you when I was…away.”

“Away?” she asked, smiling at the absurdity. “No, you died. My brother and my father died. I went to your funerals.”

“I know,” Oliver ground out.

“No, you don’t. Mom had Walter,” she frowned, shaking her head. “I had no one. You guys all act like it’s cool. Forget about the last _five_ years. Well, I can’t. For me, it’s kinda permanently in there so I’m sorry if I turned out some major disappointment, but this? Me? It’s the best I could do with what I had to work with.”

Oliver had to close his eyes for a moment. She moved to leave with her friends, and he pick pocketed the drugs from her purse. He threw them out, and ran into Laurel.

They stared at each other for a moment. He broke the silence between them. “You should complement Tommy on his choice in lighting.”

“What?” she asked, frowning at him. “That’s the first thing you want to say to me after five years?”

“You met me and Tommy at the same time,” he told her. “I couldn’t see color before I left. Someone else made me see it, Laurel.”

“Are you saying?” she asked, shaking her head then looking around him towards Tommy. “All those years?”

“I was a coward and didn’t know how to tell you,” he said, turning to face his best friend. He had a confused look on his face, watching him and Laurel with a drink in his hand. Oliver turned back to Laurel. “Good luck.”

He walked away from her, checking the time and the bank account. He had a name to cross off the list. 

* * *

 

Felicity jumped as Evans, a coworker and with only one year more at the company than her, knocked on the door to her office. “Supervisor wants you,” he said then left.

She huffed and marched her way over to her supervisor’s office. “I don’t know what I’m being called in here for because I haven’t done anything. Wrong that is.”

“What are you talking about Smoak?” he asked, squinting at her. “I need you to do a job. A VP did something to his desktop and won’t let us cart it down here. Evans tried to figure it out and didn’t get anywhere. I want you to go and see if you can fix it. Is that alright?”

“So you sent me Evans rather than an email?” she asked, dropping her shoulders and giving him an unimpressed look.

“I’m here to manage people, not worry about tech,” he said, running a hand through his grey hair. He wrote something down on a post it note then handed it to her. “Here’s the guy’s name and office.”

“Alright, I’m on it,” she said, taking the note and checking the office’s location. She grabbed her tablet out of her office then left the designated IT area. She found a gaggle of people standing around the elevators.

“Is something wrong with the elevators?” she asked, which would happen the one of the few times she has to leave the IT department.

“No, but didn’t you hear?” a woman to her right asked. “Oliver Queen is visiting.”

“And they stopped the elevators for that?” she asked, gripping her tablet too tightly. Looking at her knuckles, she couldn’t tell if they were whitening because of her grip or because her colors were fading again.

“His mother is being a little protective of him right now. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Not if it’s stopped the elevators. I need to get to a VP’s computer.”

“Hey, that means you might actually get to see him,” the woman said, looking at her with bright eyes.

Felicity stared back at her in horror. “What? No, absolutely not.” 

* * *

 

Thea had left Oliver in front of his tombstone and empty grave. He stared at the engraved stone slab and the green of the grass filled in but the stone remained grey. He turned back to the house, but left soon after.

He picked up a carton of ice cream then headed towards Laurel’s. She opened the door, and he held up the carton for her to see. “I had no idea these had colors on them, missed this on the island.”

“You can’t just dump that Tommy is my soulmate on my lap and walk away,” she said then sighed. She held the door open for him, and he went in.

“Thank you,” he told her. “And sorry about that.”

“No comment on my color choices for the apartment now that you can actually see it?” she asked as she followed him into her living room.

“My colors don’t come in right,” he confessed. “I don’t actually know the names of any of them either.”

“What? Why?”

“I was on an island and couldn’t ask anybody,” he said, shrugging.

“No, why don’t you see the colors right?” she asked, coming towards him with a concerned look.

“I don’t actually know my soulmate. I just got a glimpse of her. I only get flashes of color or else I have to concentrate.”

“How? When? She can’t be dead if you still see colors.”

“I just want to eat the ice cream.”

She looked him over for a moment then nodded. “I can tell you the names.”

The ice cream tasted wonderful, and he learned his soulmate had blond hair. The pleasant evening came to a grinding halt when he heard a noise that led to him trying to run from Chien Na Wei again, but at least she didn’t recognize him. 

* * *

 

Felicity got off early to go at Alissa’s insistence to the dedication ceremony for the new building for the Applied Science Division.

“Do you think we’ll see him?” Alissa whispered to him. “Walter Steele, Moira Queen, and Thea Queen are all here.”

Felicity scanned the stage, finding the exact three people Alissa mentioned. “Maybe, I don’t know, maybe this wasn’t a good idea. We aren’t technically even supposed to be here.”

“No, shush, this is your best chance after you didn’t go to see him yesterday when he came to visit the offices. Besides, it’s outside. We’re in the back, and I want to see him in real life, too.”

“Nothing is going to happen,” Felicity said, squeezing her eyes shut until she heard clapping. Walter Steele stood at the mic.

Walter began his speech, but was interrupted by a voice saying, “Whoa, whoa.”

Everyone turned to look, but Felicity couldn’t see anything.

“What about me? I’m a legacy,” the man continued. “Hey, thanks for warming them up Walt.”

Felicity stared wide eyed at Oliver Queen’s back as he climbed up on stage. The first time she laid eyes on him in person, and he appeared in perfect color. She could hear his voice over the microphone as he spoke to Walter and took the shovel from him, but couldn’t make out distinct words, especially as other people began whispering around them.

“Some of you may not know me. My name is Oliver Queen,” he paused for a moment, looking around as a few cameras flashed. “Watch some television, read a newspaper, I’m kinda famous right now. Mostly though, I’m famous because I’m Robert Queen’s son, but, ah, Walter.”

He placed his hand on Walter’s shoulder then turned back to the audience. “Who’s my new dad, hah? Sorry, as Walter was saying, I’m not much of a legacy per se, and, uh.”

Walter leaned in towards him, but Oliver pushed him back. “No, sit, sit. Gosh.”

Walter sat down, and Oliver put his hand on the podium. “See I was supposed to come here today, and I’m supposed to take my rightful place at the company.”

Whatever smile he had worn earlier had gone. “Prodigal son returns home, and becomes the heir apparent, but I’m not my father. I’m not the man he was.”

He turned to look at his family, and Moira looked away. “I’m not half the man he was. I never will be. So, please, stop asking me to be.”

He stepped away from the podium with his head down and stuck the shovel in the ground. He walked past his family and left.

“He’s really good at faking drunk, and making off the cuff speeches,” Felicity said with a heavy sigh.

“What? He wasn’t drunk?” Alissa asked, turning to her and looking flabbergast.

“Too serious at the end. He meant it so he had to know what he was doing,” she said, turning away and walking off in the opposite direction he had. “This didn’t make anything better. My colors still aren’t any good.”

“Maybe,” she started to suggest, trying to keep up with her. “Maybe, it’s just because he didn’t look at you.”

“Alissa, please, I think it’s time to stop.” 

* * *

 

Oliver stood in front of the headstone they had put in for his father. He had convinced himself the rock was grey and not a lack of being able to see its color. He kneeled down before it, dropping his head with a short sigh.

“All that time on the island, plotting my return, I didn’t,” he shook his head. “Realize how hard it would be to…to reconnect with…Mom, Thea…Laurel.”

He had to take a deep breath before continuing. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know how painful it would be to keep my secrets. You asked me to save the city, to right your wrongs, I will. I swear.”

He frowned at the rock with his father’s name. “But to do that, I can’t be the Oliver everyone wants me to be which means that sometimes…to honor your wishes…I need to dishonor your memory. I’m sorry.”

He took in a breath. “And I want to find her, my soulmate. It’s unbelievably stupid…with the mess this is turning into. I just want to see her, everything, in full color. Once would be enough.”

He looked at the stone for another moment then stood and walked away, motioning for the workers to dig up the headstone as he left. 

* * *

 

That night, Felicity found an article on Somers with interesting details about a confirmed police sighting of a man in a hood. It mentioned the vigilante wore dark clothing, but made no mention of any actual color to his clothes. “Sounds like Hawkeye, but Hawkeye doesn’t have a hood,” she said. “And this guy seems less spy and more detective.”

She sighed and closed her browser. She got herself a bowl of ice cream and a glass of wine. After two years and so much hoping, she found herself on her couch back at square one and comparing her life to a romance novel that was missing it’s other main character. She had a second glass of wine before going to bed.

She curled up under her covers, breathing through clenched teeth. “I should at least get the chance to see whoever the hell this crappy soulmate of mine is.” 

* * *

 

After being shot and poisoned, dealing with the Bratva, and two deaths, Oliver had to get the information off Deadshot’s shot up laptop, and that meant going to someone who had actual trained IT experience. He only had Queen Consolidated’s IT department to go to and asked their supervisor for the best person they had on staff. He received a name and an office number.

He walked into an office with blue walls, and she sat at her desk, turned away so her blond ponytail faced him. He watched her for a moment then cleared his throat. “Felicity Smoak?”

She turned her head to look at him, and the pen between her lips turned red. All of her had color, no wavering or inconsistency, just solid color. He held his breath a moment too long, waiting.

Her desk and everything on it remained grey. Then he said, “Hi, I’m Oliver Queen.”

She pulled the pen from her mouth and looked at him with wide eyes. “Of course,” she said, pulling her chair back in towards her desk. “I know who you are. You’re Mr. Queen.”

“No, Mr. Queen was my father.”

“Right,” she said, holding up a hand. “But he’s dead, I mean, he drowned, but you didn’t, which means you could come down to the IT department and listen to me babble, which will end in 3, 2, 1.”

She set her pen down and pushed away from her desk. He tried for a smile. “I’m having some trouble with my computer, and they told me you were the person to come and see.”

He set the laptop on her desk. He took in a breath and crossed his arms. “I was at my coffee shop surfing the web, and I spilt a latte on it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Cause these look like bullet holes,” she said, making a face and pointing at one of the holes.

“My coffee shop is in a bad neighborhood.”

She tilted her head, and he had to smile at her. “If there is anything you can salvage from it, I would really appreciate it.”

She looked at him for a moment then nodded. “Mhhm.” 

* * *

 

Felicity stared as he sat down in her spare seat. “Oh, this is happening immediately with you watching, okay.”

“Is that a problem?” he asked as she began hooking up the damaged laptop to scrounge up what information she could. It took a few minutes, but he didn’t complain. He just brought the chair over so he could sit beside her and see what she was doing.

She pulled up the most recent item. “It looks like blueprints.”

“Do you know what of?” he asked.

“Exchange building,” she answered, glancing at him.

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s where the Unidac Industries auction is scheduled to take place.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, and she leaned away from him. “I thought you said this was your laptop.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding as if that could convince her.

“Look, I don’t want to get in the middle of some Shakespearean family drama thing.”

“What?” he asked, waffling between looking at her and looking away.

“Mr. Steele marrying your mom,” she said, remembering his speech from before.

He tilted his head forward.

“Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet?”

“I didn’t study Shakespeare at any of the four schools that I dropped out of,” he said, shaking his head.

She turned back to the laptop. “Mr. Steele’s trying to buy Unidac Industries, and you’ve got a laptop associated with one of the guys he’s competing against.”

“Floyd Lawton,” he said, probably telling the truth that time, sort of.

“No, Warren Patel, who’s Floyd Lawton?”

He sighed. “He is an employee of Mr. Patel, evidently.”

He didn’t look at her after that.

As soon as he left her office, Felicity put her head in her hands. It really couldn’t be him if they both looked right at each other and gave names and only he and her pen had solid color as her blue walls wavered. He had lied blatantly straight to her face about the laptop, but nobody said that featured anywhere in finding your soulmate. 

* * *

 

When Diggle regained his senses on the medical table in the Foundry after being poisoned by Deadshot’s kurare, Oliver already had his hood down and his face bare in the green tinted light. “Hey.”

“Oliver?” he asked, climbing off the table despite the bullet wound. “You’re that vigilante.”

Diggle took a swing at him, and Oliver ducked.

“Easy, Digg, you were poisoned.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Oliver caught him this time. He set him back against the table he’d laid him on before. “I could have taken you anywhere. I could have brought you home. I brought you here.”

“You really did lose your mind on that island.”

“Found a couple things along the way.”

“Like what?” he demanded, raising his voice. “Archery classes?”

“Clarity,” he stepped towards him. “Starling City is dying. It is being poisoned by a criminal elite who don’t care who they hurt as long as they maintain their wealth and power.”

“What are you going to do?” Digg asked, his voice quieter. “Take ‘em all down by your lonesome?”

Oliver shook his head. “No, no, I want you to join me. Special forces out of Kandahar, it’s perfect. You’re a fellow soldier.”

“Oliver, you’re not a soldier. You’re a criminal,” Digg turned his back towards him. “And a murderer.”

Oliver watched him leave. 

* * *

 

Felicity pulled up her friend’s photography blog after dinner. She scrolled through the pictures with a deep frown, hardly taking in any of the images, but her face remained dry. She saw some colors, and had no name or face or anything to hint as to who her soulmate was. The photography blog kept her from starting a rant on twitter or facebook calling out every scientist she had ever read of in the past two years and lambasting them for never considering a scenario like hers and explaining to her how it could be possible.

She closed the blog, took a deep breath, and created a new email account to make a new twitter her friends wouldn’t know about. She sent out a short tweet ‘has anyone seen color and not seen their #soulmate?’

She closed that twitter. Then she turned off her laptop. She switched to watching TV even if the matching clothes made her clench her jaw.

“Why not Oliver?” she ground out, glaring at the romance playing out on screen. “I could have at least known.”

She checked her phone before going to bed. She had several missed texts from Alissa who had seen Oliver leave her office. She deleted them without responding.   

* * *

 

Oliver recruited Laurel to Declan’s case. Then, he went to meet Diggle at the Big Belly Burger. Rob, the new body guard, told him the area was secured, and Oliver walked right up to Carly. “Hello, Diggle’s sister in law, Carly,” he reached out to shake her hand. “I’m Oliver Queen.”

She shook his hand. “I know who you are.”

“No you don’t,” Diggle interjected.

Carly gave him a steely look then walked away. Oliver sat down across from Diggle in his booth. “Hello,” he said as Diggle set his cup of water aside. Oliver couldn’t see the red on the checkered table he had seen the last time he’d been there. “I couldn’t help but notice a distinct lack of police cars when I got home. I knew you wouldn’t drop a dime on me. So, have you considered my offer?”

“Offer?” he scoffed. “That’s one hell of a way to put it.”

“It is an offer. It’s a chance to do the kind of good that compelled you to join the military.”

“Please, you were born with a platinum spoon in your mouth, Queen. What, you spend five years on an island with no room service and suddenly you find religion?”

Oliver pulled the brown, stained book out of his pocket and set it down on the table. “This was my father’s.”

Diggle took the book, flipped open a couple pages then set it down again. Oliver took it back. “I found it when I buried him.”

He laid the book flat on the table again and clasped his hands together.

“I thought you said your father died when the boat went down.”

Oliver couldn’t look at him. “We both made it to a life raft, but there wasn’t enough food and water for the both of us so he shot himself in the head.”

Oliver turned back to watch as Diggle leaned back. “And as much as he was doing it to give me a chance to survive, I believe that he was also atoning for his sins. I need to right the wrongs done by my family, and I’m offering you a chance to right the wrongs done to yours.”

“Oliver, what are you talking about?”

“The police never caught your brother’s shooter.”

“Hey,” Diggle said, leaning forward and pointing a finger at him. “You leave Andy out of this.”

“The bullets were laced with kurare. That’s Floyd Lawton’s MO. He is the sniper that I stopped.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you took down Andy’s killer?”

“I’m giving you the chance, a chance, to help other people’s families. Do you remember when the people in this city helped each other? They can’t do that anymore because a group of people, people like my father, they see nothing wrong with raising themselves up by stepping on other people’s throats. It does need to stop. If it’s not going to be the courts, and it’s not going to be the cops, then it’s gonna be me.”

Oliver collected his father’s book as Diggle stared at him. “And I hope you.”

He got up from the table, making his exit through the bathroom. 

* * *

 

Felicity took deep breaths on her elevator ride up to the executive level. She stepped out and couldn’t help glancing around like her soulmate might still be there after two years. At least she couldn’t embarrass herself by suddenly seeing color in front of her boss. She turned towards the CEO’s office with determined footsteps. She opened the glass door to the office, “I’ve got one question. Why am I being fired?”

She marched right up to the desk, hoping she wouldn’t mention anything about sneaking out early to see the failed announcement that Walter Steele’s stepson would be joining the company.

He looked up from a file at her. “Ms. Smoak, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, clasping her hands together. “And I am without a doubt the single most valuable member of your technical division. That’s including my so called ‘supervisor’. Letting me go would be a major error for this company.”

He closed the file and set it on his desk. “I agree, which is why you’re not being fired.”

“I assumed,” she said, circling her hands and trying to rewire her brain for this conversation. “When you brought me up here it was because.”

She made a motion across her neck and completed it with a sound effect.

“It’s because I wanted you to look into something for me,” he said, unfazed by her phrasing and handing her the folder. “A variance of 2.6 million dollars on the failed investment from three years ago, it was authorized by my wife. I was hoping you could find out some of the details of the transaction.”

“Find out?” she asked, leaning towards him.

“Dig up,” he clarified. “Discretely.”

She closed the folder, smiled, and nodded. “I’m your girl.”

She headed back towards the elevators, but paused at the door. “I mean, I’m not your girl. I wasn’t making a pass at you. Thank you for not firing me.”

She left, thinking she should maybe be fired for that last remark. She watched the wavering green of the floor rather than the yellow of the elevator doors as she waited to ride back down. 

* * *

 

Oliver met Laurel on a rooftop towards the middle of the night, and she told him the file from Matt Istook hadn’t helped in the Declan case.  

“We’re not done yet,” he said.

“I’m an attorney, trust me, we’re done.”

“What do you need to free Peter Declan?”

“At this point, nothing short of a signed confession from Broduer.”

He walked towards the edge of the roof.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To get a confession.” 

* * *

 

“The company Mrs. Queen, er, Steele, Queen-Steele,” Felicity trailed off as Walter Steele gave her a look. “Does she hyphenate? She seems like a woman that would hyphenate.”

Steele sat down, clearing his throat. In the light of the lamp on his desk, his sweater turned red.

“Right, the company she invested in doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There was no investment. The money was used to set up an offshore LLC called Tempest.”

“I don’t recall that name being under the Queen Consolidated banner.”

“Cause it’s not. There’s nothing registered with the Secretary of State, no federal tax records, no patent applications filed,” she said, starting to smile. “But in 2009, Tempest purchased a warehouse in Starling City.”

Steele held his hand out, and Felicity turned over the folder of her findings. She turned and left the office, biting down on her lip to keep from asking if he had any more fun assignments. 

* * *

 

Oliver kept straight as Brodeur continued to talk despite the arrow in his face. The threatening came to a halt as a phone call informed him that Declan’s execution had been moved up. Oliver sent an elbow into his face then headed to Iron Heights. He knocked out a guard and stole his uniform.

He found Laurel and Declan and cleared a path for them. Then, they were blindsided by another prisoner, the blue of his prison uniform flashing in front of Oliver’s eyes. The prisoner got Laurel around the throat, and Oliver slammed into him, punching him in the face as harshly as he could. He felt hands on his shoulders and looked up to see Laurel staring at him with eyes wide enough for him to see the green in them despite the low light.

He took a breath and stood up. Riot police came in before he could say anything to her. He walked away, but took position on the roof to see that her father came to pick her up. They talked, and Oliver pulled off the ski mask.

Later, the news revealed that Brodeur’s body guard confessed to Camille’s murder while Brodeur was arrested for his illegal dumping. Oliver crossed off his name. 

* * *

 

Felicity fell back on her couch feeling listless. After the challenge and intrigue in digging up information on Moira Queen for Walter Steele, nothing felt even half way interesting. She still remembered what had happened after her hacktivist days, but the digging she had just done was fully within her control and without partners.

She eventually just turned on the TV, planning to watch one of her prettier shows. She checked the news first, finding a segment on Jason Brodeur. She scoffed.

“I could have just dug up the info for them,” she said, leaning back to watch as the information continued to roll out on his bodyguard killing a whistleblower. “Or maybe just gotten myself killed.” 

* * *

 

Oliver found Diggle looking out the main living room’s windows. He cleared his throat as he walked into the room. “You here for the bodyguard position? Cause the new guy just quit.”

Diggle turned to him. “No, I’m not. I’m here about the other position.”

Oliver nodded and held out his hand towards him. Diggle walked towards him, the colors of his clothing washing out as he stepped away from the sunlight. “Just to be clear, I’m not signing on to be a sidekick. But you’re right.”

Oliver dropped his hand, and Diggle continued speaking. “Fighting for this city needs to be done, and you’re going to do this with or without me.”

“Yeah.”

“But with me, there’ll be fewer casualties, including you.”

“Diggle, I’m not looking for anybody to save me.”

Diggle shrugged. “No, maybe not, but you need someone just the same. You are fighting a war, Queen, except you have no idea what war does to you. How it scrapes off little pieces of your soul. And you need someone to remind you of who you are, not this thing you’re becoming.”

Diggle held out his hand. Oliver hadn’t known who he was for years already, but he shook his hand anyways.

“Oliver Queen,” someone demanded, overriding Walter’s questioning, and Detective Lance stormed in with a number of other officers to arrest him for being the vigilante. 

* * *

 

“Have you seen this?” Alissa asked, her lips tight.

“What?” Felicity asked, holding her hand out for her phone and. She scanned the article on the screen. “Oliver Queen got arrested, for being the vigilante?”

“Yeah, isn’t that crazy?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah, and despite haven’t only talked to the guy once, I’m pretty sure the guy isn’t actually the vigilante,” Felicity said, shaking her head. “Oliver cannot lie to save his life, not that I’ve figured out how he got his hands on a laptop with bullet holes. He’s built, probably could survive anything at this point, but with no ability to lie? There’s no way he could pull it off. Also, no martial arts training.”

“Oliver?” Alissa asked. “You’re on first name basis with the heir to this company?”

“What? He said not to call him Mr. Queen,” she said with a self-conscious shrug. “But yeah, he’s not exactly cold-blooded vigilante material.”

Alissa pressed her lips together. “It’s probably better he’s not convicted. Otherwise he’d been in jail for a very long time, and he’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in Starling recently.”

“Are you counting the vigilante taking down white collar crime in that assessment?” Felicity asked with a small smile.

She turned to her with wide eyes. “What if the vigilante is your soulmate?”

She laughed hard. “That’s even more of a reach than Oliver Queen.” 

* * *

 

“Guess it was just a matter of time before the police caught up with you,” Diggle said after he closed the door behind himself.

“Except they didn’t,” Oliver corrected him.

“Oliver, they got you on video.”

“I knew the security camera was there, just like I knew the police would reveal the footage and arrest me. All part of the plan.”

“So you wanted to get arrested?” Diggle asked, taking a step closer.

“Well, I returned to Starling City and a few days later the vigilante appears. Sooner or later somebody was going to make the connection.”

“So what part of serving yourself up to the cops will help you avoid going to prison for the rest of your life?”

“There’s more to it.”

“There better be for your sake,” he said, getting riled up and gesturing towards his door. “Because your family is freaking out downstairs. Oliver, your mother and your sister just got you back, and now you’re going to put them through a trial, maybe even worse? Don’t you care?”

“Of course I care,” he said, voice coming out deeper than he meant it to. The green color of the wall reminded Oliver of the one person Diggle didn’t list, who he might not ever see again if he went to prison. “The mission comes first.”

He turned the laptop around so Diggle could see the screen and Leo Muler. 

* * *

 

“He’s gotta be fine if he’s throwing a party,” Felicity said to the television as the reporter on screen talked about Oliver preparing for a house party despite having been arrested.

She changed the channel to find one of her pretty TV shows. She also pulled up her social media where she found more info coming in about Oliver Queen. She broke down and made a tweet about it.

‘Queen’s whole party thing is ridiculous not to mention what a horrible theme’

After a few moments she sent another one. ‘Should have gone for a Hamlet theme even if he doesn’t get the reference #QueenParty’

Later, she received an alert about a reply to her tweet. It came from one of her friends.

‘You talked to Oliver Queen???’

“Oh, shit,” she said, going in to rectify the situation.

‘Only cause I work at his company and he had computer trouble’

It didn’t stop the tweet from getting a few too many retweets. She logged out of her main twitter account to get away from it. She checked her anonymous twitter to see the response to her tweet about her absentee soulmate. All the responses had laughed off her question, one even telling her it wasn’t April Fools. She sighed and logged out of that twitter account as well. 

* * *

 

The party ended with Lance shooting an intruder in the chest in Oliver’s bedroom. He escorted Oliver to the couch in the living room, and Thea joined him after most of the guests had left and placed a hand on his arm. “How did you know I was in trouble?” Oliver asked as Lance came back into the room.

“Your fight broke the ankle monitor.”

“Are you alright?” Moira asked, storming into the room.

“Mom, I’m fine, I promise.”

“This is on you,” Moira said, rounding on Lance. “By accusing my son publicly, you’ve made him a target.”

“Do you have any idea who attacked Oliver?” Walter asked.

“We haven’t IDed him, but it has to be someone with a grudge against the hood, obviously,” he said, then knelt down to undo Oliver’s ankle monitor.

“What are you doing?” Oliver asked.

“Just got a call from my lieutenant. Arm’s dealer was attacked across town tonight. By the vigilante,” he said, looking to Moira. “Multiple witnesses put him there. In light of that, all charges against your son are being dropped.”

Moira straightened. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family, but would you kindly get the hell out of my house.”

He turned to leave, and Oliver stopped him. “Mr. Lance? Thank you.” 

* * *

 

Felicity looked up at the sound of knuckles on her office’s doorjamb. Alissa stood in her doorway with a smile. “Hey,” Felicity said, pushing away from her desk. “Got something for me?”

“Not really,” she said, entering her office and her smile slid into a grin. “So what was that about Oliver Queen not getting a Hamlet reference? How on earth did that come up in your entirely professional conversation with him?”

“I was concerned,” she started. “That he had been trying to do something illegal or to hurt Mr. Steele. He had a competitor’s laptop on him, and it had multiple bullet holes. He also lied very poorly about it. What was I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know, preferably would have liked to hear something about all your colors coming in.”

“I’m sure many others have wished the same. It didn’t happen so oh well,” Felicity said with a shrug.

“We will find your soulmate one day,” Alissa assured her with a firm nod.

“But maybe not right now,” she said, pointing to her desk. “I’ve kinda got a project to work on.”

“Yeah, I’m leaving. Good luck.” 

* * *

 

“You know, one of these days you’re going to be straight with me about what really happened on that island,” Diggle told him.

“Absolutely,” Oliver said as he started in again with their sparring. He struck Diggle in the lower back. “But not today.”

He walked away and brought Diggle’s attention to Scott Morgan. His photo background came out too blue compared the greys of the lowlight in the Foundry. Diggle brought up a gang of robbers attacking Starling banks instead, and Oliver shot him down. He had a duty to his father and an obligation to take out the sources, nothing more.

“Seems like you have a very narrow definition of hero,” Diggle said as he walked away.

“I’m not a hero.”

Diggle got his way regardless, lying and telling him that Scott Morgan had tried to kill himself to get Oliver to talk to the wife of the injured police officer. Diggle responded to being called out about lying, “You asked me to work with you.”

Oliver nodded and began walking. “Let’s go make a difference, catch some bank robbers.” 

* * *

 

“I should add personal internet researcher for Oliver Queen to my job title,” Felicity said as she opened up her laptop. Oliver shook his head and sighed. She added, “Happily, I mean.”

She tried not to look over to his bodyguard as she pushed up her glasses.

“His name is Derek Reston,” Oliver said, “We were close before I…went away, and I want to get back in touch.”

“Guess you didn’t have facebook on that island,” she commented as she pulled up what she needed to.

“Nope,” his bodyguard said. “Not even a myspace account. It was a very dark time.”

“Well, there’s not much here that was recent,” she said. “No credit activity, no utility bills. I guess you guys must have met at the factory.”

“Wait, what factory?” he asked, leaning forward and frowning.

“The Queen Steel Factory,” she answered, pushing up her glasses and trying not to see the blue of his eyes. “Derek Reston worked there for fifteen years until it shut down in ’07.”

He looked away. “Derek Reston worked for my father?”

“You weren’t really close friends, huh?” she asked, tilting her head. “Looks like Derek was the factory foreman until your dad outsourced production to China about 1500 employees got laid off. Looks like the finance guys even found a loophole in the union contract so they didn’t have to pay severance packages and pensions to their employees. They all pretty much lost their homes.”

Oliver looked at her dead on, almost to the point of glaring, and she had to glance away as she spoke. “Including your friend.” 

* * *

 

Oliver walked to the elevator, trying to forget the color of Felicity’s too bright lipstick. Few people wore make up like that, and almost all of them could see color. “I’m going down to the bar he frequented, hopefully Derek Reston wants to take a trip down memory lane.”

Diggle asked, “And if by some miracle Reston’s there?”

“I’m going to give him the chance to do the right thing.”

“Oliver, he already had the chance to do the right thing. It’s called not being a criminal.”

He turned towards Diggle, and his voice came out quiet and hard. “This is happening because of my father, because of my family.”

“No, you worried about the wrong thing. It’s not your fault. The Reston family aren’t the victims.”

“My family stole from this city. They hurt the people in it, and I’m hell bent on making that right.”

The elevator dinged. 

* * *

 

Felicity left the CEO’s office after Oliver and his bodyguard had. She paused in the hallway as she heard them talking, and tried to stand far enough away so as not to eavesdrop. She focused on the floor as its green color came in too slow for her soulmate to have shown up again.

The elevator dinged, and she looked up. Oliver and his body guard walked into the elevator. It turned yellow behind them, and she could see the white gloss of the ceiling lights reflecting off its too clean surface as the doors closed on them. She bit her lip and pressed the button to call up another elevator to get back to her real job. 

* * *

 

Oliver found Derek Reston at the bar, sitting at a table playing card games with a few other fellows. He sat down as they got up.

“Didn’t figure you for someone who would hang out in the glades,” Reston told him.

“My father used to bring me here after we visited the factory. There’s a pacman machine in the back. I had the high score for two months.”

Reston gave him a half smile. “Last time I saw your father, he was making a speech about not believing the rumors about production being moved to China. Week later, they closed the doors on us.”

“My father made mistakes. He hurt people. When people are hurt, when people are in trouble, they tend to make the wrong choices. Right, Derek?”

Derek leaned back with wide eyes and his mouth not totally shut.

“But those choices, they don’t have to define you or who your family will be because there’s always one moment when you can turn it all around. If my father had another chance, I think he’d do things differently. Time ran out for him.”

“How poetic. Doesn’t help me get my house back, now, does it?”

“No, all I can offer you is an apology and a job.”

Reston didn’t take the job, and Oliver gave him his card and slipped a bug into his pocket. 

* * *

 

“He asked for you, again?” Alissa asked, voice rising in volume and pitch.

“Yeah, he just wanted me to do some research on some guy he said he knew,” Felicity responded with a sigh, leaning against Alissa’s desk.

“How can it not be something if he asked for you again?”

“Uh, cause I did my job very well the first time. He’s a client not a suitor,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You’re sure you’re not seeing all your colors?”

“I guarantee it. I can’t even see blue right now.”

“Blue, that’s so weird. You think it means something?” she asked, tilting her head and pushing her chair away from her desk.

“I have no idea. I’ve done the research into all of this, remember?”

“I know, I know, but still, I had things planned for you.”

“Yeah, trust me, however excited you are for me finding my soulmate, times it by a million and then you’re in the ballpark for how much I want my soulmate,” Felicity said, shaking her head. “It’s going on three years and that’s too long.” 

* * *

 

Diggle delivered the news of a nighttime hit from the Restons at the CRNI gala as Oliver stood in front of his mother. He turned back to his mother. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t bother,” she said, waving him off.

He left and suited up. He arrived at the bank after the Restons. He announced his presence and shot at Kyle, but he brought up a riot shield and fired back. Oliver outmaneuvered the boy and got in a shot to his chest. He snapped off the arrow and charged. He got pushed back through glass but flipped the boy off of him and began pushing his back with shoves and kickes. The security guard woke, Derek came out, Oliver shot his gun from his hands, and Derek rushed in front of the security guard’s gun as he shot. The flash of the gun sucked the color from the room.

Oliver knocked out Kyle and shouted for the security guard to call an ambulance. He kneeled beside Reston as the guard ran off and pulled off his mask. “Is Kyle okay?” Derek asked between gasps.

“He’s okay just knocked out,” Oliver said as he pulled down his hood.

“It wasn’t his fault. I turned him into this.”

Oliver had to flee as Derek died and the police arrived with colored lights, pulling up his hood as he left.

At the foundry, Diggle assured him what had happened wasn’t his fault. “So maybe there is more than one way to save this city.”

“Maybe.”

“By the way, the policeman woke up. He’s going to be fine.” 

* * *

 

Felicity squinted her eyes at her computer screen. She sighed and pulled off her glasses. Her friend had shifted away from playing with light in her photographs to focusing on natural water. Felicity couldn’t see the blue in the photos, and the green came out wrong. Focusing as hard as she could had only given her a headache instead of full color.

She exited the page and turned to social media. The blue didn’t return for the social sites’ backgrounds, leaving the sites looking strangely flat. She scrolled through them without really reading anything on them. She closed her browser and set aside her laptop.

She searched around for a colorless book, lucked out with one that didn’t even have a mention of soulmates, and retreated into the story. 

* * *

 

Oliver found his mother in living room. “Nightcap?” he asked when he saw her pouring herself a drink.

“I thought it would help. I don’t sleep well alone,” she turned to him. “I’m sorry about what I said tonight.”

He had to keep himself from frowning as the color in her hair didn’t come in as the brown of her shirt did. He recalled her hair color hadn’t come in earlier in the evening either. “No, you were being honest.”

She shook her head. “No, not entirely. The truth is with Walter being gone, I’m…I’m lonely. You know, you and I used to talk.”

She walked towards him, and he could see the color of her drink, but still not the color of her hair. “I used to know what you were thinking,” she said, pointing a finger at him. “But now, even when you’re home, you’re somewhere else. I guess I just miss my son.”

“I miss you, too,” he said, giving her a smile. “And I wish that…are you hungry?”

She didn’t dismiss him, and she let him take her to Big Belly Burger without complaint or question. “Mom,” he complained as she went for her burger with a knife and fork. “It’s okay to get your hands dirty every once in a while. For me, please”

She set aside the silverware and picked up the burger. “Alright.”

She made positive noises as she chewed. “That is a great burger. Thank you for this.”

“Anytime.”

“You know, I bet Carter Bowen doesn’t know where to find the best burger join in Starling City.”

“So I have one thing on him.”

“No, Oliver, you have everything on him,” she said, placing her hand on his wrist.

He smiled, but he still couldn’t see the blond of her hair. 

* * *

 

Felicity returned to work on Monday with a leftover headache. It made everything she already disliked about work so much worse. She had detail oriented projects to work through, and she forced herself to pay attention. It only worsened her headache, and she worked at about half her usual pace with it. “Why does color have to be such a pain in the ass sometimes?” she asked her computer.

She allowed herself a break despite the lack of outcome and went to a late lunch.

“Yeah, she got shot at.”

Felicity tried not to turn around in her seat at the insistence of the man’s voice behind her. She listened but kept eating.

“You sure? That hardly sounds believable. This isn’t the Glades.”

“No, I’m telling the truth. Moira Queen got shot out front. Some guy on a motorcycle did it. That’s why there’s so much security at the entrance.”

“Wouldn’t they give an announcement?”

“They have to sometime soon. I think someone did get hit.”

“I’m not using the front entrance any more then. Maybe I should just move altogether.”

Felicity swallowed thickly. She hurried through the rest of her lunch to get back to her computer and check the news. An article reported that Moira Queen had been hospitalized after being shot at, and Felicity returned to her work. 

* * *

 

Oliver found the shooter, Helena Bertinelli, and he didn’t kill her. Her lipstick hadn’t matched her dress, and she had said after their dinner together, “They don’t talk too much about what happens when you lose your soulmate. They always have them dying at the same time in stories. His death was my crucible.”

She hadn’t said more then, but she spoke about her fiancé again when Oliver found her at his grave.

“You said that losing him was your crucible, that it changed you,” he said, taking a cautious step towards her. “You didn’t say how.”

“You can’t turn the emotion you feel for your soulmate off when they’re taken from you. If it can’t be love that you feel then it becomes hate,” she said then took a breath. “He took the color with him, all of it. Everything is black and white again, and it’s ugly and empty and horrible.”

“I see color,” he confessed, watching her reaction. “I have no idea who she is, but I see some color.”

Her lips curled down in disgust. She walked past him at a sharp clip. “You should stay away from me, and I want nothing to do with you.”

Her father’s right hand man picked them up as they left the graveyard, and the kidnapping ended with the kidnappers dead. Oliver returned home with the certainty that his soulmate lived, but might one day soon live without any color. He listened to Diggle and abandoned Helena to be lost on her own island. 

* * *

 

“How was Australia?” Felicity asked as she stepped into Mr. Steele’s office. “I’ve always wanted to go down under. I, uh, just have this thing about kangaroos. More of a phobia, they wig me out. I think they’re like evil, and I’m sure their pictures are up everywhere in that country.”

Walter turned to look up at her. “You had something important to tell me, Miss Smoak?”

“Yes, I did,” she said, looking down at the folder she was sure was actually grey for once. “It’s about Tempest.”

He blinked and began to frown.

“Your wife’s mysterious LLC. The one she diverted company funds to,” she clarified.

“I appreciate your diligence on this,” he said, looking down. “but it was a simple misunderstanding between my wife and I. Everything’s been resolved.”

“No,” she countered, a little too loud to be speaking to the CEO. “See it hasn’t. There was something about the money transfer that felt hinky to me. The money your wife withdrew from the company, I wasn’t the only one who tracked it. She was being shadowed by another entity, and whoever it is they’re good, NSA good.”

She opened the folder to double check its insides. “But as you know, I’m good too. So, even though they left almost no trace of their presence in our system, I did manage to find one thing.”

She pulled the single sheet with the logo on it from the folder. She held it out to Walter. “Well, one image.”

He reached out for it, but didn’t take it.

“Does that symbol mean something to you, sir?”

“No,” he said, standing up and snatching the page from her. “What means something to me is one of my employee’s prying into my wife’s private business without authorization. Should it happen again, I’ll have you suspended. That clear?”

She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Crystal.”

She left with the knowledge that she still had the image saved to her work computer. 

* * *

 

The police lights almost hurt to watch even through the TV screen, but Oliver forced himself to see Helena arrested for murdering her father’s men.

He took the night off from hunting the people on the list. He spent the evening acting normal with his family and pretending he didn’t wear the weight of the island around his neck. He caught himself staring at his mother’s hair several times, wondering why her blond had disappeared that night, but remained vibrantly in place now. 

* * *

 

Felicity pushed open the door to Mr. Steele’s office again. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Steele?”

He looked up from his desk.

“Did I mention it’s almost Christmas?” she asked, grabbing the key card hanging from the lanyard around her neck as she walked towards his desk. “Many of the suicides from this time of year are due to sudden and unexpected joblessness.”

He sighed and pushed a little light brown book on his desk towards her. “I want you to find out all you can about that notebook.”

She walked forward to get a better look.

“Where it was made, how it was purchased, and what it could mean.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, picking it up. She found the same logo from Mrs. Queen’s tracker on its front and it turned from dark grey to a deep purple in the light.

“Felicity,” he said, “I asked Josiah Hudson, our head of security, to look into the same subject matter. He died the next day, under questionable circumstances. What I may be asking of you, this mystery, are you sure you want to do this?”

She felt a thrill go up her spine. “I hate mysteries. They bug me. They need to be solved.”

She gave him a nod then left his office. 

* * *

 

Oliver found news on Helena’s trial. She had made a bargain to testify against her father for a shortened sentence. She would still have plenty of jail time, but it had to be her only way to get at her father with handcuffs and no guns.

Oliver sighed, watching the color of her lipstick fade as the channel rolled footage from the courtroom. He turned off the TV and left to prepare for his next target. 

* * *

 

Felicity entered Mr. Steele’s office with determination, flicking off the lights.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“It needs to be dark in here if we’re going to do this,” she explained as she approached his desk. “If I’d had more time to think out that sentence it wouldn’t have sounded so dirty.”

She passed him the book. “Look.”

He opened it up, and she pulled out the glasses. He flipped through the pages. “I don’t see anything.”

“I got these from Applied Sciences,” she said, turning on the glasses and handing them to him. “They’re able to pick up the sub-visible variations in the UV spectrum. Now, look at the book again.”

He frowned when he saw the names, and Felicity had to look away from the red light the glasses emitted. 

* * *

 

“Hi,” Oliver greeted Tommy as he entered the Queen living room.

“There’s something I got to tell you,” Tommy said, approaching slowly and tapping his fingers against his legs. “My dad cut me off, froze all my funds. I am living on fumes.”

Oliver shook his head. “Really?”

Tommy nodded.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Embarrassment, shame, jealousy, probably a few other emotions I’m not used to feeling,” he rattled off, shaking his head.

“Tommy, my trust fund is your trust fund.”

He took a deep breath. “No, that is the easy answer, and believe me, I have loved easy answers. What I need is a job.”

Oliver nodded.

“I’m trying to change,” Tommy continued, smiling. “Not sure into what yet, but I don’t want to be what I was anymore.”

“It just so happens that I have a general manager position that is available,” Oliver made a face as he would have in the past. “You’re probably the guy for the job.”

“Will I be getting dental? This smile wasn’t cheap.”

“I’ll look into that.”

“Thank you.”

Tommy reached forward, and Oliver received and returned his hug. When they pulled back, Tommy’s eyes had full color. Oliver asked, “Has Laurel told you about the colors yet?”

Tommy gaped at him and shook his head.

“Ask her then, maybe.” 

* * *

 

Felicity called Mr. Steele as soon as she had gathered enough new information. She had already logged so many hours, he could stand a phone call that came a little later than appropriate.

“I’m in the middle of a dinner party, Ms. Smoak,” Mr. Steele informed her. “So I hope this is of some importance.”

“I guess that depends on how you define important,” she responded. “See, most people would consider finding a list of names in ultra violet invisible ink important.”

“But then I already know about that, now, don’t I?”

“Did you know that seven of the names on the list are guys the vigilante has had in his cross hairs?” she said then shook her head. “That’s if bows had crosshairs which they don’t.”

“Well, it is a rather long list, Felicity, so I would expect there to be some overlap.”

“Like Doug Miller.”

“Head of Applied Sciences at Queen Consolidated, what of it?”

“Mr. Miller may end up getting an arrow in his stocking because he’s on the list. So? Important or not?”

Mr. Steele hung up on her. She pulled the phone away from her ear and glared at it. “Apparently not, but that’s not going to stop me from figuring out what connects it all.” 

* * *

 

“We get an arrow, we get a beat on where he purchased them,” Oliver confirmed when Diggle asked about the archer who had taken out Adam Hunt.

“So what’re you going to do?”

“What anyone does when they need help,” he said and turned to Diggle. “Call a cop.”

He had a phone delivered to Detective Lance, and called to politely but insistently ask for one of the copy cat’s arrows. The following day, he took his sister out to Big Belly Burger to ask her about the Christmas party they apparently weren’t going to host. She told him they skipped Christmas and tried to pass it off as okay.

“No, it’s really not,” he said, trying to imagine what the house would look like at Christmas in color. Later, he told his family. “Maybe, I can be the reason we have Christmas again. I thought I would throw the Queen Christmas party.”

Lance called him later and gave him a location. “There’s a heating vent on the corner of O’Neil and Adams. You will find what you’re after there. You got ‘til Christmas then I’m coming after you.”

He found the arrow exactly where Lance said it would be. He brought it back to the Foundry and examined it under magnification, at that point deciding the shaft really was black. Diggle joined him after he’d gotten most of the information he could out of it.

“This is a custom job,” he said after explaining its unusual attributes.

“He trying to frame you, or call you up?”

“Either way, I need to find him.” 

* * *

 

Felicity had the list of Queen Consolidated employees from the book pulled up on her tablet, but she couldn’t see anything new in them.

“Hey.”

She jumped, nearly dropping her tablet. She released a breath. “Don’t you knock?”

“Felicity,” Oliver Queen said, smiling. “This is the IT department. It’s not the ladies’ room.”

She breathed a sigh, looking down and smiling. “Right.”

She locked her tablet then gave him her attention. “What can I do for you?”

“My buddy Steve is really into archery, apparently, it’s all the rage now.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why,” she confessed, setting her tablet down. “Looks utterly ridiculous to me.”

He gave a small nod. “Anyways, it’s Steve’s birthday next weekend, and I want to buy him some arrows. Thing is, he gets these special custom made arrows.”

He pulled the arrow in question out of a cardboard tube. She stared at the sharpened metal point. Even in the low light of her new office the arrow looked too dark to be anything other than black.

“And I have no idea where he gets them,” Oliver continued, holding out the arrow towards her in both of his hands. “I was hoping you could find out where this came from.”

She gaped a little as she reached out for it. He pulled it back from her fingertips. “Careful.”

“Yeah,” she said, taking hold of it this time. He sat down on the other side of her desk as she began to look it over. “The shaft’s composite is patented.”

She pulled up her browser on her computer. “And that patent is registered to a company called Sagittarius.”

She smiled and held the arrow out to him. “It’s Latin, for the archer.”

“Really,” he said as he took the arrow back from her. “Could you find out where and when this was purchased?”

She smiled again and sighed as she began typing on her laptop. “According to Sagittarius’ records, that particular arrow was part of a bundle shipment. 200 units.”

She wrote down the address on the top sheet of her notepad. “Sent to this address.”

She ripped the sheet off and passed it over to him.

“Felicity,” he said as he took the sheet from her. He smiled and shook his head. “You’re remarkable.”

“Thank you for remarking on it.”

He stood to leave and moved towards the door. “And merry Christmas.”

“I’m Jewish,” she corrected automatically.

He turned from the door and took a few steps back towards her. “Happy Hanukkah.” 

* * *

 

“Would have been funny if it’d been green, rich guy copying the vigilante and scourge of white collar criminals.”

Oliver heard Felicity say as he left her office. He paused just out of her line of sight.  He looked over his shoulder back towards her office then shook his head. He walked out of the IT department. He had other work to do.

Oliver suited up and found the wharf the arrows had been delivered to. He walked in and the door closed and locked behind him. He turned away from the door to find some type of water based bomb had activated. He blew the door open to get out and avoid getting roasted.

The Christmas party seemed to be going better than the recon had gone. He ignored Thea’s teenaged male friend when he arrived with flowers he claimed were for Moira. Oliver asked for a holiday photo for the family, and the boy really did give the flowers to Moira. He still walked off with Thea though.

Oliver noticed his mother whispering to Walter. When she left, he asked, “Is everything alright between you two?”

“I’m sure it will work itself out,” Walter responded, following Moira.

Tommy and Laurel arrived together, matching with Tommy in navy and Laurel in red. Oliver smiled at them. “So glad both of you could make it.”

“Merry Christmas,” Tommy greeted first, giving Oliver a hug.

Laurel repeated him.

“Color coordinating now?” Oliver asked them.

Laurel nodded and Tommy smiled. “Trying to,” she answered with a smile. 

* * *

 

Felicity stared in shock as the news report came out about the hostages taken to draw out the vigilante. The woman on screen shook, as did her voice as she spoke, and her mascara ran black down her face. Her stomach coiled, but she continued to watch as the channel switched to the images of the police cars outside where the hostages were being held. She pulled up twitter to find her friend’s reactions.

A hashtag had already been created for the situation, and a couple of her friends had already sent out prayers or support for the officers on the scene. One railed against the kidnapper, and another cursed out the vigilante.

“The vigilante has arrived,” the reporter announced, pulling Felicity’s attention away from her phone screen.

The channel showed a clip of the vigilante ziplining onto the roof of the building and crashing through a window. The lights on the building had lit him up enough for her to see the green of his outfit. The hostages appeared on the roof minutes later. Felicity sighed.   

* * *

 

The fight ended with Oliver in the hospital, but his family all arrived to see him and Diggle covered for him. Thea stayed behind after his mother and Walter left. “I know I’ve been hard on you for being different than you were,” she said, coming closer to his bedside. “But the truth is, I’m not the person I was five years ago either.”

“So maybe we can just accept each other, not for who we were, but for the people we are now.”

“Yeah,” she said, revealing that she had snuck in two red and white candy canes.

Later that evening, after his family had left, Oliver stood up with the aid of a cane and walked to a window he had perhaps looked out when he’d first arrived back in Starling. “You know, Diggle, when I confront people on the list, I tell them they’ve failed this city,” he said, still looking at the window. “But tonight, I failed this city.”

“No, there’s five hostages at home right now enjoying the holidays with their families,” he paused. “Because of you. This other guy, this other archer, he’ll get his. And you’ll give it to him.”

“We might have a bigger problem. The other archer told me that somebody compiled the list,” Oliver explained, swallowing hard. “I always assumed it was my father, but what if it wasn’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think there’s someone else out there, someone who’s more of a danger than the archer, and I am going to take him down.” 

* * *

 

After the relief that the hostages had returned home safe if shaken, Felicity returned to work after the holidays to learn that Walter wasn’t in his office. Gossip spread around her about him the longer he stayed away from work. She checked his records and found nothing that even hinted to an unexpected trip. The news released information that Walter Steele had been declared missing not long after. Felicity chewed her lower lip and she took in the news.

She honed in on the book. More and more of her time at work was taken from her formal projects and reassigned to research the book. She went through the names thoroughly one by one, starting with the ones connected by Queen Consolidated. “Damn,” she said, leaning back in her chair and rubbing her forehead. “Only accusations and nothing concrete, nothing I can prove. No wonder the vigilante is the only one getting anywhere with them.”

She sat up straight. She started on the list of people the vigilante had targeted. Underneath the apparent connection of white collar crime, she had to do more digging and began a time line of when the vigilante accosted them. All of them had received media coverage upon getting close to being caught by the appropriate authorities, or at least someone connected to them. “At least we know he watches the news,” Felicity said then frowned. “Wait a second, how did he get the book? He couldn’t have taken it off one of them otherwise he wouldn’t have known how to find Adam Hunt.”

She trailed off, picking up a pen and starting to chew on it. “He picks targets by news, and maybe he knew an insider?”

She pulled up the list of Queen Consolidated employees on the list. “I want to talk to him.” 

* * *

 

Oliver attempted to ply his mother from her room with food from Big Belly Burger, but she refused even that. Thea told him how Walter and Moira’s relationship began and threw out a ridiculous proposal of Walter cheating with a stewardess, just for it not to be an abduction. A news report came on questioning where the vigilante had been after his positive effect on the populace. Thea remarked, “Looks like everyone’s disappearing.”

A few days later, he picked up a call for the vigilante and heard Laurel’s voice. “Hello? I need your help.”

He suited up, cut her lights when he arrived, and walked into her apartment. She gave an explanation then held out a file to him. “Take a look at his file. If Danny de la Vega was murdered, we have to bring his killer to justice.”

Oliver took the file and passed it on to Diggle to contact a friend. Tommy yelling at the contractor upstairs interrupted their conversation, and Oliver went up to check on the situation. Tommy proposed a fundraiser for the fire department. Oliver asked, “What happened to the guy who rented out a pro-football stadium to play strip-kickball with models?”

“That guy needed a swift kick in his lazy ass.”

Oliver returned home to walk in on a meeting with an executive of the company tried to convince his mother to step up as CEO. Diggle pulled him away from his sister to tell him a pick up at the scene of Danny de la Vega’s murder had appeared at another burning building, and only the man in the hood could get there in time. Oliver didn’t arrive in time, but he did catch sight of an identifying tattoo, its color lit up by the flames surrounding them. 

* * *

 

Without Walter, without any CEO really, Felicity had no one to report to. She had a collection of comments and diagrams and her lists, and no one to tell them too. If Walter had been taken because of the same reason the head of security had, she could be next. Whenever the thought popped into her head, she had to take deep breaths to stop her heart’s fluttering, and she locked up all of her data on the subject just a little bit tighter.

“You aren’t still having problems with the soulmate thing?” Alissa asked her, leaning in close to whisper as if anybody else cared about Felicity’s life and problems. “Are the colors bothering you again?”

“Still have no idea who it is,” she answered, twisting her lips. “But no, the colors haven’t been bothering me too much lately. I don’t know if that means I’m closer or farther from them though.”

“Wish I could help,” she said, tilting her head and giving her a puppy dog look. “I felt like we got so close.”

“I know, but right now, the problem is just this weird project I have,” she said, waving her hand towards her workspace. “I think it might get cut which is incredibly frustrating because I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

“I know what you mean. I’m sorry about that. Is it that thing that you kept going up to the executive floor for?”

Felicity blinked, and she could hear her heart beating. “No, no, that was like an Oliver thing and then one quick thing. The thing that might get cut is something else entirely. Have I really been going up there that much?”

“Not recently,” Alissa said, frowning. “That’s why I asked.”

“Well, I gotta get back to work. Good luck on your own stuff,” she said, making a weird gesture towards Alissa’s work area before walking quickly back to hers. 

* * *

 

Oliver ran into Laurel at the fire station. “What are you doing here?”

“I told Joanna I’d clean out Danny’s locker, and you?” she asked.

“Tommy sent me over to check that the guest list for the fireman’s gala was accurate,” he explained.

“Tommy’s been working very hard on that,” she said, nodding. “It’s very generous of you, Oliver.”

He shook his head. “It’s truly not.”

Laurel moved forwards, and he stepped around her. He turned back. “Speaking of Tommy, he told me you were being very protective of your drawers.”

Laurel turned back to him with wide eyes.

“This is not a fancy term for your underwear,” he clarified, holding up his hands.

She took a few steps back towards him. “Are you and I seriously having this discussion?”

“Well, we’re friends.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding once. “Tommy asked for a drawer.”

“And this is bad?” he asked, frowning.

“No, it’s just,” she took a breath, looking away. “I’m an all or nothing kinda gall. First it’s a drawer, then it’s half my closet, then it’s half my rent. Am I really ready for that with Tommy?”

“You could take it slow.”

“I don’t take things slow, remember? I close my eyes, and I jump. Just like you.”

“But you have a soulmate to jump with,” he said, no longer able to hold up a smile. “And not me.”

She looked away again. “That still doesn’t mean I’m ready with Tommy. I’m sure your soulmate is around waiting to jump with you.”

He nodded, and she fidgeted. “I have to get inside.”

He let her go, but followed her when he saw her talking to the chief. He learned about the Nodell Towers’ fire. Oliver presented the possibility of Garfield Lynns only being presumed dead to Diggle.  

* * *

 

Felicity returned home to ice cream and red wine. She dished herself a little more than she usually might, and sat down to TV and social media. She had started watching design competitions as the designers sometimes actually talked about color and what it meant for them to bring it into their work.

On twitter she found a few of her friends had tweeted her. All of them were asking for her opinion on Oliver Queen’s latest party. She had to search to find out what it was. She tweeted out “kinda surprised it’s a fundraiser #queenclub.”

She returned to her show and discovered the guest judge couldn’t see color as they marked down a designer’s dress without being able to see the effort that had gone into the coloration. Even the other judges looked at them in shock as they criticized the designer for being lazy. Felicity rolled her eyes and went to check her social media.

She saw new tweets come in reporting that Oliver Queen’s nightclub had gone up in flames. Even more came in reporting that the vigilante showed up. Someone had gotten a picture of him. His outfit looked almost black in comparison to the vibrant orange of the flames eating up the club. 

* * *

 

In the morning, Moira came down in a suit. “I’m taking Walter’s position at the office.”

“What changed your mind?” Oliver asked.

“Not what, who,” she said, standing up straighter. “My daughter, my family, and I promise you, Walter will get back to us. I will keep looking for him, and I will find him. And I will see you for dinner.”

Oliver nodded as she left the living room. He turned to Thea and found her frowning. “What?”

She shrugged. “Just feeling the whiplash. She went from shut in to chairman pretty fast.”

“Sounds like you got through to her.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Later, Diggle joined him in the basement of the Foundry. “So what’s next?” he asked as Oliver got down from the salmon ladder. “More training?”

Oliver walked towards him and picked up the brown book. “No, we go hunting,” he answered with a grin. 

* * *

 

“A Queen’s the CEO again,” Alissa announced, waltzing into Felicity’s office.

“What?” she asked, automatically locking away everything she had been working on.

“Didn’t you hear?” Alissa said, leaning towards her.

“No?” she responded cautiously.

She rolled her eyes. “Moira Queen has decided to step up as CEO.”

Felicity nodded, trying to swallow and calm her pulsing heart. “That’s great.”

Alissa shook her head, looking her over. “I thought you’d be more excited about your hot, rich visitor’s mom working here. He might come in again to visit you now. It’s been a while hasn’t it?”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Oliver Queen, the one who almost was your soulmate,” she clarified, holding a hand out.

Felicity held up a hand. “Pretty sure you can’t almost be a soulmate. It’s one or the other. And it’s great she’s stepping up. Really, we needed someone as CEO. Might as well be someone with their name on the building.”

“Do you have something to work on, and that’s why you’re being weird?”

“Yeah, actually, I’d like to get it done now, seeing as we have a new CEO to make a good impression on,” Felicity said with a nod.

“I’ll leave you be then,” Alissa said, giving a little sigh and walking out.

Felicity unlocked her computer and dove into the servers to remove any trace of her meeting with Walter about Moira and her more questionable actions. 

* * *

 

Diggle intercepted Oliver when he went to question Ted Gainor of Black Hawk, but he grabbed a USB on the desk on his way out to ensure he got some information out of the infilatration.

He confronted Diggle at the Foundry. “I could have shot you!”

“I can’t believe you would trust a list somebody else wrote over me,” Diggle threw back at him.

“I trust my father, and he explained to me that every name on the list has a reason to be there.”

“I thought you got the book off his dead body. How could he have been so chatty?”

Oliver clenched his jaw and shifted his weight. “A few years ago, I found a message he left me explaining the list.”

“Oliver, how was that possible? You were on a deserted island.”

“I didn’t say that I found it on the island,” he retorted. “Diggle, for the past four months I have lied to and hid things from all the people I care about. Do you really think I would go through that if I wasn’t sure?”

Diggle shook his head and looked away. “Gainor got me into Black Hawk, and I’m gonna prove he’s innocent.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“You owe me that. You owe me at least that,” he said before walking out of the Foundry. 

* * *

 

Felicity scooped up a forkful of her Chinese takeout then looked up to see Oliver Queen entering her office. She set the takeout aside. “And here I was beginning to think my days of being Oliver Queen’s personal computer geek were coming to an end.”

“Is that your way of saying you miss me?”

“No,” she said, pressing her lips together. “But if it works for you, go with it.”

He gave a short huff of a laugh. “So a friend of mine is running a scavenger hunt, and there is a case of Lafite Rothschild 1982 waiting at the end.”

“Oh, I love red wine.”

“But, in order to find it,” he said, pulling out a black USB drive and holding it out to her. “I first need to get through this.”   

She took it from him. “Hm, security fob.”

She pulled off its cover and plugged it into her computer as he walked around her desk to stand behind her. A window popped up on her screen. “It’s pin protected. The challenge response goes back to a company called Black Hawk Squad Protection Group.”

“Yeah, my friend had his body guard set it up for him. Personally, I think it’s cheating, but whatever.”

“This is a military grade cryptographic security protocol. Your friend really went to all this trouble?” she asked, turning towards him with a hint of teasing in her tone.

“The idle rich are hard to entertain,” he responded. “Listen, you get through it, and one of those bottles of wine is yours.”

He tapped her on the shoulder with just his finger. He walked away, and she couldn’t tamp down her smile. She shook her head and focused on the encryption. 

* * *

 

Oliver had returned to the Foundry when Felicity called him. “What did you get?” he asked as he continued down the stairs.

“I think your friend’s body guard gave him the wrong security fob.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, once I got past Black Hawk’s authentication system, there wasn’t anything about a scavenger hunt. Just a directory.”

He shifted his weight as she paused.

“I think you’ve stumbled onto, well, have gotten me to stumble onto, something pretty illegal.”

“Define illegal.”

“Oh, you know, robbing an armored car with grenade launchers and tear gas.”

“Whoa, what?”

“Someone at Black Hawk was using their system to store detailed routes and schedules for each of the city’s seven major armored car carriers including the three that have already been hit.”

Oliver grimaced at the news.

“Mr. Queen, I think we should provide this information to the police. With it, they should be able to predict the next heist.”

“Hold on, Felicity,” he said, leaning forward even though she wasn’t in front of him. “I don’t want you to get into trouble with my friend so do me a favor. Forward that directory onto me, and I’ll get it to the police personally. Thank you.”

He hung up on her. He received the information from her, suited up, and took to the streets. He got in two good shots, but they got away after nearly hitting him with the grenade launcher. 

* * *

 

Felicity heard about Thea Queen first. A whole slew of tweets came out about her being taken to the hospital after crashing her new car. She had frowned at the tweets and their treatment of the girl, especially the ones that dragged out her past. She had read a number of things about Oliver Queen during his party days, but they hadn’t ever carried a tone like the tweets she read now did.

She went and unfollowed anyone who spoke meanly about her, and favorited all of her friends posts that weren’t about that situation. By that time, the blue had started sliding towards grey. She sighed at it happening a second time and continued with her usual habits.

Once she got back to work, she had the book to contend with and Moira Queen as her CEO. “Let’s check google.”

She searched Moira to try and get a better handle on her outside of the little conspiracy book Walter had given her, and found a recent article about John Diggle as Moira Queen had been the one to hire him. It brought up that he had recently been employed and then left Black Hawk, claiming they had tried to coerce him into helping them perform a robbery on an armored truck.

“Guess there wasn’t a scavenger hunt after all,” she said, shaking her head. “Oliver, you dirty liar. You just wanted to keep your body guard.” 

* * *

 

Oliver had only a name to show for chasing down all the dealers selling vertigo. Diggle reminded him of Thea’s hearing. Oliver left the suit in the Foundry and returned home, making sure to give Thea advice about hearings in the morning. The hearing still didn’t turn out well as the judge wanted Thea to stand as an example.

Oliver first went to the cops for the possibility of them being able to catch the Count, but they had little more than he did. He tried Laurel next, pleading for her to ask her father to help Thea. Then, Oliver turned to the Bratva to help him locate the Count, taking Diggle with him for back up. He had to fake killing a man to get the Bratva to agree to arrange a meeting, but it put him a step closer. It meant meeting the Count without the suit, but he would do it for Thea.

Laurel pulled through and gave Thea the alternative option of working at CNRI with her. Thea resisted, and Oliver divulged his mother’s secret despite Moira’s anger upon finding out.

He also discovered that the Count had an interesting way of selling his drugs. “56 people died to perfect this high. They did not die for nothing.”

Oliver kept his expression even. He had the case in his hands when the police pulled up. He chased the Count as he fled on foot. He got a hold on him, but the Count turned and stabbed him in the chest. “No witnesses.” 

* * *

 

“Hey, Felicity,”

She turned at the sound of her name to find Oliver Queen standing in front of her with his body guard a step behind him. “They said you’d be up here.”

“You look like something the cat dragged in. Not that there are cats in this building,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Well, once a cat did get in, but a security guard tased it. Smelled like fur and static in here for like a week.”

He didn’t appear to be looking quite at her. “Would you mind stepping away from the window? I have a little bit of a hangover.”

She nodded and went around to stand on the other side of him. “Sounds like you need a Bloody Mary and a pretzel, not the IT department.”

“Actually, my buddy Kevin is starting an energy drink company, he says it’s fantastic for curing hangovers, but I’m very particular about what it is I put in my body,” he said, wavering on his feet some as he pulled something out of his pocket.

“I’ve noticed,” she said then flinched. “I said not noticed, right?”

Oliver smiled then rasped like he was about to laugh. “I’m trying to find a secret recipe. Could you please do a spectra-analysis of the sample and find out exactly where in the city it’s made?”

He held out double syringes with a yellow liquid inside towards her, and she took them from his hand. “If it’s an energy drink, why is it in a syringe?”

He looked over at the wall behind her head. “I ran out of sports bottles.”

Diggle walked away. Oliver smiled at her, stilling looking bleary. She nodded and walked away as well before she tried looking too closely at those blue eyes while he was clearly not at normal functioning capacity with a lie like that. 

* * *

 

“Looks like Felicity came through,” Diggle announced hours later at the Foundry. “Ten block radius of where East Glades meets the Bay. Nothing there but an abandoned juvenile detention center.”

Diggle wouldn’t let him leave without hitting a tennis ball he held by his head. Oliver aimed, but he didn’t shoot. He left regardless and without the bow. Oliver got vertigo into the Count’s bloodstream, but left him alive for the police.

The following morning, he dropped Thea off for her first day of work at CNRI. Felicity called him, and he waited at the Big Belly Burger as she requested. He waved at her when she arrived.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Thanks for meeting me here, I was nervous to come to your house,” she said, smiling at him.

“Okay,” he said, almost laughing.

“The thing is; I’ve been debating whether or not to share this with you for weeks.”

 He leaned his head towards her. She took a breath. “Can I trust you?”

He frowned at her.

“I’m not an idiot,” she said, insistent. “You’ve dropped some fairly ridiculous lies on me, and yet, I still feel like I can trust you.”

She huffed a laugh, looking down to watch as she twiddled her thumbs. She looked up at him again. “Why is that?”

He tilted his head. “I have one of those faces.”

She looked away, not smiling.

“Sorry,” he said, and she looked back. “Yes, you can trust me.”

“Then I have something to show you,” she said, opening her satchel. She held out a little light brown book to him. He took it from her. He opened it to see the list in the same font and ink as his book, but on clean, crisp pages.

“Have you ever seen this before?” she asked.

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Where’d you get it?”

“From your stepfather.”

He looked up and had to hold in a gasp. Night had fallen hours ago, and the electric lights weren’t that bright, but the colors came in too strong, pushing out the grey he had grown so used to. He had to shake his head and bring back the conversation. “From Walter, um, where did he get it?”

“He said he found it in your house,” she started then paused. “That it belongs to your mother. Walter thought she was hiding something. Something more, and he wanted me to look into it, but then he vanished. I think this list might have cost Walter his life.”

Oliver had nothing to say that could assure her, and the color began to drain away from her. 

* * *

 

Felicity shut the door to her home behind her and leaned back against it. She took a deep breath in a let it out slowly as she slid down to the floor. She had given the book to Oliver, and he could pass the book onto Moira and tell her that she’d given it to him. She clasped her hands together and told herself that it wouldn’t happen. She still had her own copy of the list and all the research she had done.

She got up from the door and set her bag aside and pulled off her coat. She glanced to the TV and retreated to her room instead. She changed into pajamas then set about getting the easiest food to make she could.

“That’s enough excitement for one night,” she told herself as she cleaned up after herself.

She ran a hand through her hair and returned to her bedroom. She laid on her back in bed, telling herself Oliver wouldn’t betray her to Moira in time to her heartbeat until she fell asleep. 

* * *

 

Diggle warned Oliver that his mother might not be so innocent. Oliver brought the book to Moira, saying Walter had given it to him, and she said, “This is your father’s notebook. He kept a list of all the people in Starling City who owed him favors. I had no idea there were so many of them.”

She threw the book into the fire, and the book burned blue. “The only way to keep this family safe is for everyone in it to stop asking questions, including you, Oliver.”

When told of her actions, Diggle responded, “Doesn’t mean you have to believe her.”

Laurel interrupted them, calling the Hood to warn him about Cyrus Vanche. Oliver suited up to search out Vanche’s lawyer’s property. It ended with Vanche deciding to target him to raise himself up in the criminal world. Then Lance ambushed his meeting to hand information over to Laurel. He returned to the Foundry only for Diggle to inform him he’d be driving Moira around. “You’re spying on her?”

“Just doing my due diligence, Oliver, just to see if she meets with anyone we might be interested in.”

The following day, Tommy stopped over and joined him in the living room while he’d been trying to find a chef for the club. Tommy told him, “Laurel’s working with the Hood guy.”

Oliver did his best to console him as he explained, “I can’t believe that Laurel of all people would lie to my face.”

That evening, Diggle asked him to come to the Foundry. He played a recording, and Oliver heard his mother say, “I already knew Robert’s yacht was sabotaged.”

Lance called to tell him Laurel had been kidnapped, but he still need more information on something his mother had called the undertaking.   

* * *

 

Felicity had started clearing off her work computers of all traces of the list an hour ago. Oliver hadn’t responded to her after taking the book from her, and she reminded herself of that every time she deleted another file dedicated to it. “How did I gather so much stuff for this?” she asked herself as she continued clearing it all away.

She checked the time and stopped cleaning for the day. She still had one last item she actually needed to complete for work before she could go home. Her stomach rumbled as she hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime. She picked up her pace.

“Time to get out of here,” she said, getting up from her seat.

She pulled on purple her coat as she left the office, noting that at least a few other people were staying later than she was. She double checked she had everything she needed to bring home and headed towards parking. 

* * *

 

Oliver crashed through the window into his mother’s office. He beat down the men meeting with her and shot the lamp off her desk. Then he aimed an arrow at her. “Moira Queen, you have failed this city.”

She reached for the phone, and he shot at it. She backed away from the desk with her hands raised towards him.

“Stand still,” he commanded, notching another arrow and pointing it at her.

“Please don’t kill me.”

“Do you know anything about your husband’s disappearance?”

“What?” she asked, lowering her hands.

“Is Walter Steele still alive?” he shouted at her.

“I don’t know where my husband is, I swear,” she said, backed up against the cabinet.

“Do you know anything about the undertaking?” he asked, and she turned towards the cabinet. “I said, don’t move!”

She turned back with a picture of him and Thea raised in her hands, lowering herself to kneel. “I’m a, I’m a mother, I have a son, Oliver, and a daughter. Her name is Thea. She’s just a teenager. Please, don’t take me from my children.”

She had tears in her eyes, and she kept shaking her head. “They lost their father. They can’t lose me, too. Please, whoever you are, please.”

“Okay,” he said quietly, and slowly lowered his bow. He held up a hand. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She gasped, turned away again and reached into the cabinet. She pulled out a gun and shot at him multiple times. Oliver’s stomach dropped, and he hit the floor. He could feel pain in his shoulder, and he could hear his mother calling for help on her cellphone. He dragged himself out of the room, looking for somewhere safe and a way back to the Foundry.   

* * *

 

Felicity spotted her bright red car in the almost empty parking lot and unlocked it. She opened the door, putting her bag in the front passenger seat as she got in. She started up her car and heard a groan behind her. She jumped and turned around, gaping as she gripped the back of her seat. “Whoa.”

The vigilante lay across the backseat of her car with his head down. “I’m not going to hurt you, Felicity,” he said, voice tight and raspy.

“How do you know my name?”

He reached up and pulled back his hood, revealing short brown-blond hair. “Because you know my name,” he said, gasping in pain.

“Mr., Oliver, oh, wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything about you just became so unbelievably clear.”

As the words left her mouth, all of her colors sharpened the way leaves had when she had first put on glasses all those years ago. She had to suck in a breath, staring at the vibrancy of it all, even in a dingy underground parking lot, and especially at the red standing out on the breast of his green outfit. “You’re bleeding.”

He shook his head. “I don’t need to be told that.”

“You need a hospital,” she said, putting her hands on the steering wheel without looking away from him.

“No, my father’s old factory in the Glades.”

“No, no, you need a doctor, not a steel worker.”

“Felicity, you have to promise me that you are going to take me to my father’s factory and nowhere else.”

“Yeah, promise,” she said, looking him over again then shifting gears to reverse. “Something tells me blood stains are not covered under my lease.”

As she drove to the Glades, the colors began to drift away from her as Oliver’s breathing grew more labored. She could do nothing more than grip the steering wheel tighter and drive a little faster as her stomach tried to eat itself. She parked at the Factory and fumbled to get out of the car. She got the back door opened and tried to haul Oliver up.

“Just get Diggle,” he rasped into her ear, telling her the code to get in.

She ran to the door and messed up the code once with her jittery fingers before unlocking it. She rushed down the stairs and found Diggle watching the news. “Excuse me?”

Diggle jumped, whipping around to pull a gun on her. 

“Can you help me? He’s really heavy.”

Diggle lowered the gun and followed her up. Oliver had lost consciousness by the time they had gotten him downstairs and onto the makeshift medical table. Diggle got off his upper layers. “Oh dammit, he just missed the carotid. It’s a zone 2 wound. Press there.”

Diggle placed her hand on a clean cloth covering his wound. She pressed as he walked away. “I should have taken him to a hospital.”

“No, Felicity, that’s why he asked you to bring him here because he knew the police would want to know how and why he got that wound,” he explained, bringing back a medical cart.

“I’m guessing how and why are Oliver Queen’s least favorite questions.”

“Yeah, well,” Diggle said as he began loading medical supplies onto the table. “There’s also when and where he’s not too fond of.”

“So we can’t bring him to the hospital?”

“We are bringing the hospital to him,” he answered as he pulled out a bag of blood from the bottom drawer.

“Is that?”

“Yeah, his blood, he stored it for a rainy day, and I say right now? It’s pouring,” he said, coming up beside her and laying his hand over the wound. “I got it. Over there.”

She moved around to the other side of the table. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Yeah, I had some medical training in the army. I just hope it’s enough,” he said as he pulled the cloth away. “You ever play Operation when you were a kid?”

“Yes,” she answered, looking away as she pulled on gloves. “And it never made me want to throw up.”

“Felicity, hey, listen,” he said, reaching out for her arm. “Trust me. He’ll be fine. He’s been through a lot worse than this.”

She looked down and could see the pink scars crossing his body for herself. “He better be fine,” she muttered before listening to Diggle.

 “Good job,” she said as Diggle pulled the last stitch through. “I think.”

“His heartbeat’s elevated, but at least the bleeding’s stopped,” he said, setting down the tools he’d been using. “Thanks for your help, kept your head on.”

She began to pull off her gloves. “Well, I’ve always wondered how I’d react if I found my soulmate shot and bleeding inside my car.”

“He’s your soulmate?” Diggle asked, turning to watch her as she moved around the room. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“I only found out just now. I mean, I’ve seen color for years, but not totally. Not like I did when he pulled off his hood.”

“Then all of this must be pretty shocking to you,” he said, gesturing to the area around them before starting to clean his hands.

She smiled as she looked down at the arrows beside her.

“What, are you saying you called this all along?”

“I’m not saying anything,” she said, leaning over to check out the arrows. “Except Oliver brought me a laptop riddled with bullet holes, had me trace a black arrow, and had me research a company involved in armored car heists. I may be blond, but I’m not that blond.”

“Yeah, Oliver’s not too great at the cover stories.”

Felicity laughed. “Neither are you. The two of you with that energy drink hangover cure? Please.”

She walked down along the tables, looking over everything on top of them. “What was really in that vile anyways?”

“Vertigo.”

“I knew it. I mean, I didn’t know it was vertigo for sure,” she said, holding up a finger. “But I definitely knew it wasn’t something that could cure a hangover.”

“We had to have it analyzed so we could take down the Count.”

She turned towards him, studying him for a moment. “That was you and Oliver?”

“And you Felicity,” he said, nodding his head. “Without you, we never would have found him.”

She glanced over to Oliver. “But why come to me? It’s not like he knew, not any more than I could have.”  

Diggle walked towards Oliver to sit on a stool by the table. “As hard as it is for him to admit, even Oliver needs help sometimes.”

Later into the night, Oliver began to seize and the pace of the beeping increased. Felicity and Diggle ran to the table. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“There’s a syringe labeled adavant it should stop the seizure, go,” Diggle ordered as he held Oliver down.

The beeping stopped as she went to grab the syringe and all the color drained, back to how her vision had been three years ago. “His heart stopped,” Diggle said.

“I’m calling 911,” she said, moving towards her phone.

“No, wait, you can’t,” he said, grabbing something else from the medical cart.

“You know how to use one of those?” she asked, pointing to the machine.

“We are about to find out,” he said, pulling the paddles from it.

“You didn’t say clear,” she criticized as he placed the paddles on the pads on Oliver’s chest. Nothing happened. “I heard the charge. That’s good news”

She ran around the table to get to the machine.

“How’s that good news?” Diggle asked as he held the paddles aloft.

“It means it might not be the machine, it could be the wiring,” she said, grabbing a tool from the top tray to open the machine up and fix it before her vision went completely.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

She heard a noise sound from the machine. “Try again.”

“Clear,” he said, and Oliver’s body lifted from the table.

“Clear,” he said again, and Oliver’s heart began to beat again.

Color swam blearily in Felicity’s vision, and she breathed in deep as the colors settled. Diggle put the paddles away. “The hell did you do?”

“I’ve been building computers since I was seven. Wires are wires,” she explained and he dropped his head. “What do we do now?”

“Pray we don’t have a heart attack ourselves.”

After some time, Felicity asked about the people Oliver had killed.

“Unfortunately, there’s always casualties in war.”

She nodded, looking back to Oliver.

“When he wakes up, would you like me to leave?” he asked.

“Yeah, that might be a good idea,” she said with a nod. “We have a lot to talk about.” 

* * *

 

Oliver opened his eyes to the ceiling of the Foundry and the sound of beeping. He heard footsteps and turned his head to see Diggle and Felicity coming towards him. “I guess I didn’t die,” he said, his voice coming out low and raspy. “Again.”

Diggle rolled his eyes.

“Cool,” he said and blinked again. The color seemed wrong, and he couldn’t find any grey. He frowned, looking at Felicity.

“I think it’s time I give you a little privacy,” Diggle said, putting a hand on Felicity’s shoulder. “Let me grab the blanket for him then I’ll head upstairs.”

Oliver edged his way into a sitting position as Digg grabbed the blanket. Felicity kept her eyes on the ground and twiddled her thumbs. He took the blanket from Digg with a nod in thanks, and Digg continued on and up the stairs.

“How is this possible?” he asked as he wrapped the soft blanket around himself. “I’ve seen you, talked with you before, and it did nothing to change the colors I saw.”

She shrugged. “Honesty, I think. You never told me the truth every time before now. My colors got better when you took off your hood and then got bad again because you were dying.”

“Sorry,” he said, ducking his head.

“You know, I thought it might have been you when you came back from the island, but that had to be wrong. How could Oliver Queen be the soulmate of a lowly IT girl?” she asked and shrugged, gesturing to the area around them. “I think all of this might be why. I was a hacktivist in university, was pretty serious about it. Got some pretty serious consequences out of it, too.”

He looked around at all the evidence around them of his nighttime activities. With all of his colors, it looked so much fuller with the flat greys transformed to colored shadows.

“I stopped for a reason. I’m not a people person. I can’t help you after everything you’ve been through. I can only fix computers,” she continued.

“No,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “I don’t need help, not yours, not Diggle’s, not anyone’s.”

“We just saved you after you got shot,” she said, facing him with her eyes wide.

“Not like that,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I don’t need you to talk to about my problems or what happened on the island. That’s what therapists are for. If I’d wanted that I’d be talking to a therapist.”

She stood up straighter, putting her hands on her hips. “Then at least tell me one thing about the time you were gone. If you were on a deserted island, how did you see me? I started seeing color at least two years after you had disappeared.”

He gritted his teeth, shaking his head. He sighed and looked at her. “I wasn’t always on the island. I was in Starling City, and I saw you that night, not that I knew it was you. I couldn’t stay.”

“Couldn’t even leave a note?”

“No, not even that,” he said, shaking his head.

She nodded, looking around the room. He sighed. “Are you going to think about joining us?”

“What? You and Diggle in all this?” she asked, gesturing with both hands to his arrows. “I think on a few conditions.”

“What would those be?” he asked, feeling the beginnings of a smile on his lips

“One, I get total control of your network because right now it looks like something from the ‘80s and not the good part like Madonna and leg warmers.”

“Alright,” he said, now smiling.

“Two, I want to find Walter.”

“My stepfather?”

She nodded. “He was nice to me.”

“We can do that. Anything else?”

She took a deep breath. “I want you to be more careful. Your heart stopped tonight, and I thought I was going to go blind because you’d died. We’re connected. We’re soulmates. You can’t just die down here.”

“I can’t promise you that,” he said, straightening his back as much as he could with his new wound. “I have an obligation to my father I need to fulfill, and I will do it.”

She shook her head. “I know we’re not really a thing, and we don’t know each other that well, and I can’t really ask anything of you, but doesn’t seeing color and being soulmates mean something to you? I’m just asking you to not take any unnecessary risks, not stop entirely. I’m not going to help you fight your way to suicide no matter how noble you think your cause is.”

“It’s not a death wish,” he said, his voice sounding quiet after her building volume. “I wouldn’t have asked you or Diggle to sign up with me otherwise. I came back for my family.”

She stared at him with her jaw tight and her hands in coiled fists. He tiled his head. “And you.”

“Would you have told me if you knew when you came back?”

“That you were my soulmate, but all I remembered was that you were blond,” he said then cracked a small smile. “I also think you said something about me being cute.”

She let out a huff of breath, her shoulders relaxing. “Don’t think this means you’re getting out of a serious conversation. We have to figure out what this is between us, what we’re going to be if I’m going to join you.”

Oliver nodded. “Maybe we should start simple, go on a date or two.”

“What?” she asked, a laugh bubbling up but cutting off as he gave her a look. “You actually want to go on a date with me in non-platonic circumstances?”

“Felicity,” he said, tilting his head. “You just said we were soulmates. Why wouldn’t I want to date you?”

She pursed her lips. He leaned forward. “If nothing else, it’ll be to make up for not speaking to you the first time I saw you and then for another two years.”

She smiled. “A date then wouldn’t have mattered anyways. I only saw you for the first time tonight.”


End file.
